How to Make a Video Game

Step 1. Game Idea

If you don't have an idea yet, here's how to come up with one. Let's start searching on gaming sites. There are several sources for ideas, and the secret is to play and look at other games. And not just a few, but hundreds. Maybe you watch gaming videos on YouTube daily, but how often do you approach watching these videos with the thought of gathering ideas for a game? Let's change that.

Let's clarify one thing: nothing is better than a completely unique game. All games in existence were inspired by games that came before them. Trust me, I've been in the industry for 20 years and have seen how developers work. No one, I mean no one, makes games by just innovating.

The art here is to steal like a pro. But to bring an idea to life, you need quality software development. You achieve this by copying and improving. Games that work are based on and inspired by old games that already worked. Don't just copy—copy and improve.

A great example is Hills of Steel, which took elements from Hill Climb Racing. They took the hills you climb with a car you control by moving forward and backward along the track, but added Scorched Earth gameplay where you shoot other tanks with ballistic weapons. How cool is that! The company became profitable right after launching the game, and still gets hundreds of thousands of downloads every week.

Sources of ideas from which new ideas can be born:

• Game Jam videos on YouTube. I love looking for new game ideas on YouTube and searching for Game Jam videos. They will give you many unique ideas you may have never seen before.
• Steam Indie Charts. Check out the latest indie games on Steam, and you'll see what people consider the latest innovations in gaming. You'll see things you can polish in a certain direction and get new ideas.
• Flash game sites. This is a source of ideas that has been used for over a decade. Angry Birds was based on a flash game, as were several other mobile games.
• Play games. Play all the games in the Google Play and Apple App Store charts and try to understand why these games are getting so many installs. They may have a brilliant marketing team, but many of these games won't stay in the charts long if the game itself isn't a winner.

Once you have a game idea in your head, you need to test it in practice.

Step 2. Understand the Market

It can be hard to stop yourself from starting to make your game right after you get a great idea. I've done that too. Once you've caught lightning in a bottle, it's hard to control yourself. But after 20 years in game development, it always turned out that proper research and analysis of the game idea are very valuable.

You should ask: "Are there competitors and what do their games look like?" Is your idea something very popular, and are a lot of similar games coming out right now? Before moving forward, we recommend reading our big guide to ordering mobile game development. The aspect of the game industry we got to know well then was understanding where the bar is set. In other words, what feature set did players of that genre expect to see in a game? 

This can also be defined as the minimum set of features. 

Step 3. Can You Finish Your Game in Less Than Three Months?

Game development can easily turn into a huge endeavor if you want to create something unique. Are you going to do it alone, or can you design, code, and create art for the game with a friend or friends? 
Let's look at a few examples and see how large-scale a game might be.

Aquapark (by Voodoo)
This game is a first-person action game where your character is a water slider. The goal is to reach the bottom of the slide in the shortest possible time to achieve prestige and glory on the high score table.
Breakdown of what needs to be created:

• 3D environment
• Player character moving along the slide, with a camera following them.
• Opponent characters need to be coded, with collision detection with the player character.
• Special abilities like jumping off the slide, flying through the air, and then landing on the slide at a lower level.
• Loading screens and start menu
• High score list and logic for saving high scores.

For a programmer and artist who know what they're doing, such a game can be developed in less than a month.

Archero (by HABBY)
This game is much more complex and requires developing a meta-game. This means you start with a character who shoots arrows at opponents. Gradually, level by level, you collect better weapons and armor, but the levels also become harder with stronger enemies to kill. The game must balance difficulty so that the player can accumulate power (better weapons) and skills (learn to defeat stronger enemies). 

To visualize better weapons and stronger enemies, you'll need to create a lot of graphics. This also requires more code. And levels need to be designed too. But since the game is single-player, where you progress from one level to another, and character movement is fairly straightforward, such a game can be created by experienced people in less than three months.

Step 4. How to Make Your Game Engaging

Let's face it. You want your game to be the next Civilization, Minecraft, or Clash of Clans. A game that people won't want to put down once they dive in. Now we'll look at the most important factors for creating addiction, player goals, and skill growth. When your video game has these elements, you can start building an addiction that won't fade.

Player Goals 

Imagine the player is a climber ascending to the top of a mountain. They feel like they are making progress and have finally reached the summit. But then they notice another peak beyond the horizon. It's another mountain they need to climb, but it will be much higher and the work more difficult. At that moment, the player feels they've achieved a goal, but now another goal looms on the horizon.

Skill Growth

The simplest example of skill growth is a game of chess. If you think of a world-class chess player, they have been playing for decades and understand all the strategies embedded in the game. If you look at all the games a world-class chess player has played—tens of thousands of games—they are constantly in the opening phase, watching what happens, how things unfold, and then replaying the game to learn. That is skill growth.

Where does skill-based gameplay come from in video games? It's gameplay where the player needs to time attacks, spells, and special abilities to parry and block enemy actions. The player will know how to use their characters, how to behave in the game, what limitations and weaknesses their characters and opponents have. Once the skill-based system is created, the game developer can focus on adding new goals for players and adding relatively inexpensive combat abilities and modifiers that create new challenges for players.

Step 5. Making Money from Engagement

If you want to make money from your game, there are many more opportunities to profit from a game nowadays. Gone are the days when the only option was to put a price tag of 2999 rubles and hope people would buy the game. The free-to-play business model is coming to all gaming platforms, and even for solo developers embracing free-to-play, there are great opportunities.

Premium

Previously, the premium model dominated games. What changed is that people became more willing to try free games and then subsequently spend money on the games they liked the most. 

The premium game market still exists, but competition is high as the audience that prefers to buy games before playing them is not growing, and marketing costs are even higher since the developer group, including triple-A developers like Ubisoft, EA, Bandai Namco, is spending more and more on marketing for this audience. 

Advertising

Over the last five years, video ads have become the dominant monetization method for mobile games. Players enter the game, complete a few levels, and between levels they are shown a 30-second video ad. When people watch the ad and often proceed to download the app or game being advertised, the game developer receives a portion of the ad revenue. 

In the mobile version, when thousands of players play your game daily, revenue starts to increase significantly, and suddenly you can turn a profit. And you can use that profit to create another game.

Economy-Based Games

The main rule for making a profit from a game is to focus on engagement. Player enjoyment comes from engagement. The game must be fun. Players can play the game for weeks without feeling like they've hit a "wall" and can't continue. 

But the thing is, they could progress much faster if they spent time. First, that's not the point—the point is for the game to be enjoyable. To succeed, you need to make the player feel like they are progressing toward the previously mentioned player goals and skill growth in the game.

When the player feels they are working toward their goals and skill growth, they will not hesitate to spend money on the game to reach their goals faster and progress more quickly.

I often talk about the relationship between the core gameplay and the meta-game. The core gameplay is the part of the game where players achieve skill growth, perform actions that move them forward in the game. The meta-game is the part of the game where the economy resides.