One time, a member of the department was talking to transition-year students about how great computer science was.

He’d been giving it the hard sell – talking about the great career opportunities, top-tier salaries, the ability to choose from a multitude of different industries, and so on. The fact that I.T. people get away with beards and Slayer t-shirts when everyone else at the office has to wear a shirt and tie. The usual speech.

Anyway, he’s talking to this transition-year class. Some of them are interested. Others aren’t. Not even remotely. To at least half the class, this guy at the front is a welcome diversion from… whatever it is Transition-year students do all day, but that’s all. He may as well be speaking Chinese. Assuming that learning Chinese is not what Transition-years do all day.

And the guy wants to know why so many have the thousand-yard stare. So he says: “Those of you who have absolutely no interest in this subject, can you tell me why?” And someone says they hate maths, and our guy debunks that particular myth. And another says they love puppy-dogs and wants to be a vet, which shuts my guy up for a bit, as computers admittedly can’t compete with puppies. And so on. He can shoot down some negative stereotypes, but others are fair dinkum. One girl says she doesn’t want to be one of those guys with a beard and a Slayer t-shirt, and you can’t argue with that. That uniform is mandatory in the I.T. industry.


But then someone says “I want to work in a more creative field.” At which point our guy drops to the floor and weeps, and starts beating the floor with his fists in frustration (probably). Because this guy is a programmer. He’s a software engineer and developer, with years of industry and academic experience. And he knows the truth: there is no field of study, NOTHING, which beats computer science for multi-disciplinary, blue-sky, French-poet creativity.

Constant Creativity, Constant Innovation

Let me explain why the whole ‘not creative’ thing is so frustrating to computer people.

Software development and software engineering is nothing but creativity, all day long. It’s bouncing ideas off your colleagues, constantly grappling with some problem or other, searching for the flash of inspiration to get the job done.

The problem constantly changes: implementing a new iPhone facebook application in Java. Doing face-recognition software for a security application. Making a better rag-doll effect when a bad-guy gets shot in a game. Whatever… all these projects are simply problem after problem, each of which needs a solution. Knowing how to code is the relatively trivial part… you’ll pick that up with practise. The knack is seeing the big picture and visualising the solution in more general terms. Creatively using the building blocks at your disposal.

This is why software development professionals huddle around a monitor to look at a smart snippet of code, and admiringly discuss things like elegance and simplicity, as if they were at an art gallery. The person who wrote the snippet ‘gets it’. They’ve cracked the problem, got to the fundamentals of it, understand it so well that they can solve it in ten lines, wheras someone else would have taken 100 lines, five hundred lines, for a less successful implementation.


All of which describes creativity in a day-to-day, employment context, where you already have a task and are looking for the best way to tackle it. But that’s not the best part.

Because as a trained software development professional, only your own imagination holds you back from what you want to achieve.

If you’re in the shower, and think of a cool new Website that’s never existed before, you can build it (or at least you will know where to start, and how to go about getting it done.)

If you’re a student here, and you think of a radical new I.T. approach which will aid sufferers

In this post we’ll look at the process of making computer games, and we’ll tell you about some resources which will get you started.

We’ll discuss some very simple ways to make games first, then ramp up the difficulty level. If you’re interested in making games but don’t know any programming and don’t know where to start, this post is for you.

Basic Principles
If you imagine that making a game means sits in front of a black console on your computer and writing thousands of lines of code, you’re wrong…mostly.

Most software projects, including games, involve stringing together a lot of little pieces from different places… graphics, sound, little scripts to control this and that, maybe a physics engine (another script) to control physics effects like gravity or wind; define actions (eg. character movements) etc.

Developers rarely write all those things from scratch— they get help from code libraries and code depositories: places on the Internet where they can download code snippets to do different things. Then they use those scripts, adding little bits, taking bits away, to fit them into their project.

Of course if you’re talking about a huge studio game like Halo or Gears of War, those little pieces (e.g. the 3-d graphics for a bad-guy character) aren’t so little, and those games are made by teams. Somebody making games for Microsoft is probably making that bad-guy’s graphics (using a tool like Blender http://www.blender.org/, say) all day long. A guy making a Flash or XBox Live game on the other hand is multi-tasking: making graphics, creating animations, writing code to generate actions, testing, and so on.


Absolute Beginners
The easiest way to make your own game is using a web-based game-maker. Sploder is a good example (http://www.sploder.com/ ). Go to Sploder.com, sign up for an account, and you can create simple games in a few minutes by dragging tiles, enemies, doors etc. onto a canvas. Enemies and other objects are pre-programmed (ie they already know how to move about, fight etc.), so there’s no coding required.

This is the simplest way to make your own game. It’s not going to win many awards, and won’t teach you much about programming. But it’s a good place to start.

Here’s a video showing what Sploder can do:
http://www.youtube.com/v/d0NvZU_KS_I...



Beginners
Microsoft Popfly
Popfly is another Internet-based game-builder which enables rapid game development using template objects and graphics.

In other words, you drag and drop objects (your hero/spaceship etc.) and graphics onto a canvas, assign actions to objects (again using click and drag), maybe throw in a sound track, and away you go.

There are plenty of Popfly games tutorial videos available on the Popfly wiki here:
http://popflywiki.com/GameCreatorVid...


Alice
Alice is a software package developed by Carnegie Mellon University which is designed to teach programming. Another drag’n’drop game/animation maker, it’s hard to make an impressive-looking game using Alice, but its structure makes it arguably a better teaching instrument than those already mentioned. Without realising it, the Alice user is learning Object Oriented concepts and terminology, which will mean something to you some day if you decide you want to learn programming…

Get Alice here:
http://www.alice.org/




O.K., now we’ll look at some more advanced stuff. If you don’t know anything about programming, but are willing to pick up a thing or two about it, look at these options.


Medium
Yo-Yo Games’Game Maker
Game Maker is capable of making immersive, fun games, and teaching you a lot about basic game-making at the same time.

Game Maker allows you to build games using mostly the drag’n’drop methods of Popfly or Sploder, but you can use its own programming language (called Game Maker Language, GML) to write your