Q&A for How to Program a Video Game

Contact the Partner Relations department of a company that sells similar games and strike a deal. They may reject your game, give suggestions on how it could better suit the company's audience, or offer you exclusive or non-exclusive options for showcasing the game. Be professional, but be persistent as companies have hundreds of submissions at any one time they have to sift through.

With a 3D-Compatible game engine, like Unity & Unreal, you can.

It's very hard to find game engines that don't require programming, but there are some game engines that give you a choice to program or to not program. Spark Game Engine is one of them, but some of the best game engines, like Unity and Unreal, require programming.

Download an IDE that you can use to make games on Android. Some examples are Visual Studio 2015 and Android Studio, but there are many other options.

Unity is more user-friendly and has a lower learning curve and has built in api to cut development time. Also it has a few languages you can build games with, C#, UnityScript (Unity's own Javascript clone), Boo (A lesser know language which is more oriented for Python users). However, physics and lighting aren't the best and for more complex tools you need to code yourself. Unreal is good for making beautiful games with nice graphics, it has a higher learning curve and most of the tools are fairly limited so you need to make it yourself. For programming it uses its own language called Unrealscript. If you're a beginner, choose Unity to get familiar with game development and Unreal if you're more experienced.

Sites, like Codecademy, offer simple-to-understand tutorials; however, it's way simpler to learn a new language rather than starting. Codecademy can offer that. Tutorials are made for everyone to understand.

One that has 3D capabilities, such as Unreal or Unity. You do not have to just program 3D gameplay while in Unity or Unreal.

Minecraft uses OpenGL Java Backbone. Basically it is a virtual sandbox simulator, so you're going to need to consider the amount of scripts used based on the nature of the game and not the role.

You can use what ever 3D modeling tool you want, but I'll highly recommend Blender. Blender is a free 3D modeling software. You also need a drawing program to make textures, unless you take photos and use them as textures. I'd highly recommend Gimp for the textures, which is also free and open source. If you have trouble with Blender, there are plenty of guides to using it on YouTube. Blender Guru is especially helpful.

There are many options for maxing pixel art, ranging from free to paid. The best one in my opinion, and it's free, would be pixilart.com It has a wonderful range of tools for making art, and an animation page to make animations!

The original Super Mario Bros, like virtually all NES games, was written in assembly language. Assembly language is very low level, so it's not really used by modern developers. There are exceptions, as it was used to create Rollercoaster Tycoon. Nintendo now uses C/C++ to code their games.

Yes, there is an app on IOS and android called createrra. It's a 2D block game that you can design on you own.

This depends on a few factors, like graphics, length and complexity. A really simple game can take a few weeks (fun fact: the first version of Minecraft was created in just 7 days), but AAA games usually take a few years.

An approach that was succesful for me was to start researching! Get a few tutorial books on Python, Javascript, and even C++, or submit into a coding course. Keep on practicing, and if you like, you can use Tynker or Scratch, as they both have blocks, but Tynker has a Javascript option.

Yes, there are loads of apps for free coding. Some include: SoloLearn, Codemurai, Encode and more! For AR, 3D and VR games, apps like Unity and Unreal are the best.

You should use C#, as that's the language that Unity scripts are written. Happy coding!