Hi all, i was wondering if there is anybody out there who would be willing to help me to design a game, i dont know the first thing about game design but am an avid learner and am certainly not a noob as far as other areas of computing are concerned. If there is anybody that feel they can help me to work through this even if it means producing a really basic format and me then going from there it would be grealy appreciated. Once/if somebody responds i will release the full details of what I aim to achieve. Many thanks in advance.

Thx for the reply, I dont have any programming experiences unfortunately, although, I am willing to learn (quickly at that) at whichever comes recommended.

Is a full understanding of a language required or is there an application available that writes the code behind the scenes for example, like dreamweaver does for building websites.

There are plenty of online resources already there that will help you. Gamedev.net itself has a guide for beginners, you can access it from the main page. There are also plenty of articles on game design to help you get started.

Everything has it's own tutorials. If you're interested in 2D games, you can use SDL, for example. There are plenty of SDL tutorial sites (Aaron's tutorials, LazyFoo's). If you're interested in 3D graphics, there are also plenty of tutorial sites for OpenGL (Nehe, Swiftless, Cone3D). I'm sorry, but I can't say anything about DirectX

I'ts very easy to find what you want and go for it. If you look around gamedev's main site, you'll find articles that will help you with anything from terrain generation to networking to AI. Each subforum also has a FAQ and stickied posts that are extremely useful to look at. All you've got to do is read :) and I trust you can do that.

If you're looking for a "mentor", or something like it... you don't really need one. There are plenty of resources for you to point you in the right direction and can help you learn whatever it is you need to. Whenever you get confused, you can just come back here and ask us on the forums.


EDIT: Unfortunately, yes, you will need to learn some programming language in order to tap your full game-making potential. There are game creators out there (game maker) that will do things for you, and there are also game engines where they handle almost everything for you and you use a simple scripting language. You're free to use these, but I would say you should DEFINITELY learn a programming language. Java is a good first language, it was my first. If you do decide to go with java, Head First Java might be a good book to look at. You may also wish to instead try learning Python or C#, both good beginner languages.

I haven't included links here, but if you've got to learn to program first, they won't be of much help. And anyway, that's what google is for.

Thx again for another response. I will check out the main page and go from there. as for what I was asking, it was for someone to actually help (initially) to layout a format of all the things i need to consider before jumping in at the deep out i.e. terrain, characters etc. and then look into expanding on that.