Q&A for How to Make a Video Game from Scratch

Small games can take a few weeks, maybe months. Bigger games can take years.

It depends. If it's a small racing game with a few cars and some tracks, one person or a couple of people. But games like Need for Speed require a lot more resources and time. It depends on how big you want your game to be.

Yes. You can use Scratch, HTML5, Unity or Adobe Flash. All of these can be embedded in a webpage, allowing people to play it on your website.

They are designed to be addictive by producing stimuli and scenarios that strongly activate the reward centers in your brain and leave you wanting more. It's similar with good movies, books, and music, but video games can be particularly powerful because they are a combination of so many things - visuals, music, story - in addition to being interactive and challenging your abilities.

Go with gamemaker, it has a simple interface and a good event-driven system. Great for beginners.

It really depends on the size of the game you're aiming to create. If it were a smaller game it may require less skill to create, a larger game would require more. You must also take into account that there are different skills required to make a game. You might have the programming skill, but you'd still need to be able to create the artwork for it. This is why most games are made by a team of people.

If you have a lot of programming skills and are planning on making something small or simple, then yes. A larger, more complex game will be harder to make, especially for one person. If you plan on making a larger, more complex game, consider making it with a team of people (writers, artists, programmers, etc).

Sure, a small indie game on your own, or a medium-sized one with a team would be possible.

Go to their site (you can Google them to find the site) and follow the steps to download the engines.

This depends on your skills. Engines that use C Shape as their programming language (ie: Unity) are great for mobile games. Engines that use C++ as their programming language (ie: Unreal Engine) will give you really high graphics. Before settling on a game engine, be sure to review their licensing agreements.

There are a few stages to the designing of a game. You must first build a team (if you aim to have one), and plan how it looks, storyline, etc.

You can use any computer if you go to scratch.mit.edu. It is an online program where you can create and share projects and video games. You can also play other people's projects and remix them, so as long as your computer has an internet browser, any computer is good.

Usually games get popular from word-of-mouth and high ratings. If a lot of people see that a game is highly rated, they might be more willing to try it. If you have a game that you want to grow in popularity, ask your friends and family to play and rate it. Hopefully their ratings and vocal reviews will encourage other people to play.

If you have the required skills, you can create a small game alone. On a larger scale, you do require a team of people with different skills.

Scratch. It lets you animate, draw, and type.

There is no age requirement. Anyone can create a game if they have the correct skills and knowledge to do so.

It is, you can make games not with coding, but you need to learn scratch before making a game in scratch.

Yes, many popular or enthralling games on the market today actually use subtitles as opposed to voices. For example, a lot of indie, block-style games (excuse my lingo or term) use subtitles as dialogue.

You're probably going to need a lead programmer, and several programmers under them. Then you're going to need an art team, music team, and story/design team.

You can't. If you want to just make a game without using a software that you'd have to buy, try Scratch. It is completely free. But if you want to make a game and then sell it, you're going to need money.

You can use Scratch, an animator game to make any you want. You don't have to have a character if you don't want.

Yes, you can do this on a Mac.

Not at all, but it might help!

You can use MS Paint for drawing the pets and Scratch (a video game maker) to animate them.

Depends on your goal of technicality, and whether its 2D or 3D. Game engines are made to save you the tons of work of making a good-looking renderer, physics engine, audio engine, visual editor (if needed), and scripting language. A small game engine will be anywhere from a thousand lines of code to half a million lines of code. A large AAA game engine like Unreal Engine 4 (as of 6/18) has around 23,346,363 lines of code. (Excluding blank lines and comments), and over a decade of development. So, anywhere from weeks to decades, depending on the degree of complexity.

A few months, depending how long it will be and how well you know HTML5. If it is multiplayer, then it might even take a year.

Many indie games are published on consoles like Playstation or Xbox. It has a bigger chance to get popular than on mobile.

It depends on the game size, team size, production rate, the amount of care put in the game and your team's skill. It usually takes a large developer team a few years to make an AAA game.