I am a DBA/Analyst by trade and I work within the Property Management industry. Within this industry there are terms/phrases that have very different meanings outside of Property Management and so when seeking answers via search engines to questions specific to that industry it’s important to know/understand the jargon used in that industry else you may find too little or (just as worse) too much. For example within the development world the term property or properties has a very different meaning than it does within my industry. It is these differences between domains that makes it difficult for someone to seek answers to questions that are outside the domain they know.

Knowing how to ask the question is as important (and sometimes as difficult) as knowing what to ask. As a newbie to game development it’s difficult to know how to ask as well as what to ask so my first question or search for assistance in how to find the answers is…

How can a newbie to game development get a high level explanation of the parts of video game design such that they can best determine where to go next? For example if I were an alien from another world with a fluent understanding of the English language and I had no concept of an automobile. After riding in one I decided I wanted to learn more about it so as to determine what I need to do to go about constructing my own vehicle where would I start? I would think the first stop for this alien would be an over view of the automobile, how it works at the top level and its basic parts. This would include a high level explanation the various systems that make up an automobile; transmission, body, electrical, engine, etc. I wouldn’t need to know the intricacies of each system just the top level explanation of each so that I see the automobile as more then a black box machine that will go where I tell it based on the controls.

Once I had the basic understanding of the automobile I could then determine if I wanted to build one new from the ground up, modify an existing base model or maybe just tweak a specific line. Likewise with video game development where can I find a high level breakdown of the parts of a video game and those parts interact? I assume that all modern 3d video games are based on a game engine consisting of a map (the game world), characters (both playable and NPC ) with flexible traits (i.e. skills), objects such as weapons and crafting/useable items and the ‘other items’ that are key components but may still be separate from the game world, characters and objects such as lighting and effects. As a newbie I have no idea if the PBR (physical based rendering) is separate from the engine or not.

I know the above is rather lengthy but I am trying to convey as best as I can what I am looking for, where I’m coming from and why as a newbie to this industry it can be difficult to know how to ask and not just what to ask.

Thank you

Basically, a game is a complicated input/output function.
Remember your "print table of X" program? (type a number, and it prints a table for that number).

A game is similar, except the output is a long stream of slightly different pictures, which we perceive as animation.
The input is not a number, but commands like "go left", or "jump", by means of button presses.
Last but not least, there is a sort-of world, a game map, where the player, the enemies, and the treasure are stored. This world changes through time (or actions by the user or the enemies)

So in all, a game is an interactive video about the player character, a movie of a changing world, where the player element is controlled by the user.

From the stream of pictures follows the game loop (one iteration produces 1 picture, you want 30+ pictures / second), which is roughly

while not dead do
    scan for new input from the user;
    update the world;
    draw the world, and show it to the user;
end

You can program a game in pretty much any language, from general purpose like C/C++ to C# to Java to Python.
There are also dedicated programming languages and systems, often (but not always) dedicated for some sub-set of games.
These dedicated systems come in all shapes and sizes, with different aims.

Some are dedicated to a specific type of game (adventure authoring software), others try to reduce programming effort (game maker), game engines are generic frameworks aimed to handle all the generic things that are the same for many games, leaving you to do the non-generic parts.


As for making these games, the recommended approach is to start simple, and scale up as you get more experience.