Chapter 2. From Design to Production

All great selling video games start off with a design phase. Think of fantastic games like Portal 2, Destiny, or The Last of Us. All these games had a huge production and design phase. It would be a little unrealistic to think such amazing games started with the director saying, "Hey guys! Start creating some levels, we'll figure things out later." Granted, sometimes it is necessary to create games like this to get your creative juices flowing, but for the most part, it's a great idea to design your whole game first, and then start developing. This will certainly streamline the development because you wouldn't have to think as you go. That's what we are going to discuss in this chapter; how we can go from the design phase into production.

Let's see what we are going to cover:

• Designing your game

• Creating sprites for your game

• Starting the production of your game

Now, the fun really begins. From this chapter on, we are going to create your first game (for some...

The design process

Already have an awesome idea for a game? Great! Now put it down in writing and try to be as detailed as possible. You may have heard of a design document, which is exactly what it sounds like; a document full of details of your game, whether it's story content, weapons, items, characters, and so on. Here's a good baseline template for your design document:

• Name of the game

• Storyline

• Overall environment of the game: Do you want it to be comedic, or dark?

• Objectives: Things your player will have to do to resolve the issues in the game

• Game Progression: How is the game going to play out? Slow and steady, or fast?

• Features of the game: We are talking about SDK (Software Development Kit) level here. What do you want to include? Game Center, Xbox Live, Leaderboards, or online multiplayer?

• Characters: This is a fun one to work on. Who is the main character? What's his (or her) background story? What does he (or she) look like? What are they wearing? Who is the girl you meet in...

From paper to screen

Make sure your whole game is designed, and carefully planned with every detail. What now? Well, let's take it from your paper planning and create sprites for the game.

What are sprites? Sprites are the images that make up your game, from your player to items and environment elements; each image you create is a sprite.

Drawing your sprites are really not difficult, in fact you can even scan your drawings into Photoshop and draw on top of your paper drawing. Incidentally, we are going to do something similar. Here's a drawing of a simple character:

Credit: williammalone.com

Nothing fancy, but certainly something simple we can work with. Let's open up our scanned image in Photoshop.

Typical sizes for sprites are 32 x 32; however, with bigger screens such as the Galaxy Note and iPhone 6 Plus, we will want to use some larger sprite sizes. For this example, we are going to create a 50 x 50 sprite. We will worry about sizing it later.

Once Photoshop is opened, you will want to...

Production

From the images you created, or even ones you may have downloaded, we are going to start using them in GameSalad. We are going to see how to import images, make actors out of them, and start laying out some levels.

Creating our Project

Let's start with our project.

Open up GameSalad, and under Create a New Project, click on the Blank Project option. You can fill in all the details of your game if you like. I'm going to call the project title "Adventures of Kevin, Episode 1: Curse of the Stinky Fish". Yep! Click on the Scenes tab and open up the Initial Scene:

Under the Library section, click on the Media button. This section will show you all your imported images. Click on the + button at the bottom of the Library window, and a window will open to select your media. Simply select all the images you want to import and click on Open, and that's it! If you want, you can also drag-and-drop your image files directly into the Library window for fast importing. The same goes for importing...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed a lot about the game design process. Some good procedures to follow and how it can benefit you during the development process. These are just recommendations for you, as you can tweak your own design process to whatever works for you. We also discussed how you can use certain design documents, and how you can take your drawings and put them into GameSalad. From there, we learned how to start designing levels within GameSalad.

In the next chapter, we are going to delve a little deeper into GameSalad. We're going to discuss how to create a main menu, game introductions and logo animations, option menus, and level selection menus.

Go get yourself a nice coffee, beer, glass of wine, or milk, and let's dive into the next chapter.