You love to play video games, but did you know you can create your own? Through free or inexpensive software, it’s easy to design your own game without having to be an expert in computer programming, or even a programmer at all for some of the software products.
Genesis 3D is an open source software product that allows one to develop games, and it a great place to begin in designing your own game. As this program is a software development kit (SDK), one has to know how to program in order to use some of the modules natively, but you can do things like creating 3D worlds through a drag and drop interface. And since the software is open source, it’s free, however if you make any modifications to the program (the source code is available as well), you are obligated to make your new code available to other users under the terms of the user license. You are not required, however, to release your game’s source code.
To start designing your game, you can create a 3D room in the Genesis 3D World Editor. There are different sections of the screen in this program where you can manipulate the top, front, and side of the room, and where you can set the texture of the cube. You can also move the shape around and rotate it, and resize it if you want. There are also controls for moving around the newly created room, setting the lighting, and adding objects to the room. In all, this is an easy piece of software to use to create 3D rooms, and there are many more advanced modules used to finish the game off. In fact, several game design software programs actually use Genesis 3D as a base, so it’s definitely one of the more trusted names in the business.
Another software product used to design games is FPS Creator. This program is used to create first person shoot-em-up games, and unfortunately, this software is not free; you have a 30 day trial period before you have to pay for it. The good thing though is that there are no royalty fees on your games, so if you get to the point to where you want to commercially develop games to sell, you are free to do that with those created in FPS Creator without having to pay any more money to the company.
To use FPS Creator, you start out by dragging and dropping rooms from an overhead view, and then place players and objects in the room. You can very quickly create games in this manner, and other options like additional doors and windows are a snap to add. There are even model packs you can add to the software to add more advanced 3D objects to the game to give it some spice. This software is one of the easiest and most user-friendly I’ve seen when it comes to designing games.
If you want to design your own game, there are lots of software programs out there to help you, so you don’t have to start from scratch with a C++ compiler anymore like in the old days. Thanks to the wide range of software programs out there, you can tailor your experience to how in-depth your programming knowledge is. You can create a game from start to finish and not write a single line of code, or if you want to get more involved in the coding, you can use a product that requires programming knowledge. Either way, the software products available today make it fairly easy to create your very own computer game in a relatively short period of time.
