Anonymous asked: Hello! I wanted to say that your art is amazing! And that you're a great inspiration to me! Lately I've been awed by game design and development and I really would love to maybe delve deeper into the subject and practice 3D modeling. However since I have no background with it I don't have the slightest clue about even where to start.. I was wondering if you could perhaps share how you began game development and what tools you use. I hope I'm not bothering you DX.
Wow thank you! To be honest, I still feel clueless most of the time, but I’ve been (casually) working towards becoming a game designer/artist for almost three years now, so I guess it’s sort of coming true the more I work at it (except the part where I actually finish a game on my own *dies*) Let’s see, I attended a design school that had a strong focus on digital media, including programming and two classes on game design. Around that time, I came across this video and this article that changed my whole opinion about the practice of designing games. In my head it went from being a cool thing to being the COOLEST and most untapped medium of our time that can be extremely expressive without the use of language (because I’m horrible at communicating ideas with words) If you liked that video, I suggest watching this more recent talk about designing puzzle game mechanics. It has been really helpful with thinking about game design as a process.
Ok, so after I decided I wanted to design games, I also decided that I wanted to make 3d games. My design program had a 3d class, but to be honest they weren’t teaching me the program quickly enough so I went to lynda.com and just sat down for a couple days and went through the essential training and then the character modeling and rigging tutorials. There are tons of resources out there for learning 3d programs. I chose maya because that’s what we were learning in class and I was able to get a 3 year free student license.
I also use great resources like Polycount, and found other 3d artists that I liked. Many people share their process on the forums, so it’s great to go through threads for tips.
For general game design info, I love gamasutra. There are many game designers who write helpful articles including how to get started!
The GDC vault is another great resource,
As far as actually creating games, I have been using unity. It’s a free game engine that has tons of community support, so if you’re bad at programming (like me) many times you can search your problem and chances are someone had the same question as you!
Whew that was a lot of links.
My general advice for getting started is to imagine what you want to create, and then try your best to create it. There will be a lot of struggling involved. I remember starting with 3D modeling was quite disorienting and it always felt like I was creating things the wrong way, but slowly it started to click. Just get in there and start extruding some polys!
