"When I Grow Up, I Want to Make Video Games"

Rogelio Valdés

Oct 9, 2020

What should you do when your son or daughter tells you they want to make video games when they grow up?

Sometimes this industry can be difficult to understand. Many people have asked me whether it is really a viable field, whether their children actually have a future in it, or whether it is just a hobby and a waste of time.

The answer is no, it is not a waste of time. Let’s compare the video game industry to the film industry. At first glance, making a video game may sound simple. “You just need a computer and one programmer, right?” That is like saying that making a movie only requires a camera and one actor. In reality, both films and video games require writers to create dialogue, specialists in visual and sound effects, designers, and many other roles in order to be produced professionally.

To give an example, let’s look at a company called Rockstar Games. In 2014, the company produced a game that cost 250 million dollars to make. That was a huge amount of money for a single game, but the company ended up generating around 6 billion dollars from it. The first Avengers film cost around 220 million dollars and made 1.5 billion dollars. Those are the kinds of numbers the film and video game industries can reach at the highest level.

You could say those budgets are extreme and that only big studios can produce games. But let me tell you about a game called Undertale.

That game was developed at home by a young creator, without access to the high-end professional tools normally used in game production. It used simple characters and environments, not modern AAA graphics, but it still sold 3.5 million copies.

The game was almost entirely built by one young person who taught himself how to program. He got some help with promotion, but there is no doubt that the core of the game, the game that 3.5 million people bought and played, began with one person learning and building.

How does someone start?

There are three essential areas I usually talk about when it comes to video game creation:

Graphics: this is where the characters, environments, textures, and animations are created.

If children are just getting started, I recommend they begin with pixel art. At Robin we use Piskel. If you remember old Game Boy games where characters were represented by little squares, many of the most famous game characters in the world began in that style. After getting some experience with simple animations, children can move on to 2D art, whether on paper or on the computer. The final step would be creating 3D content. I always recommend starting with small projects.

Programming: game programmers are responsible for making the game actually work. That means enemy behavior, how environments function, how the player moves when certain buttons are pressed, and all the logic behind the system.

Again, I recommend starting with simple tools. I like teaching children with block-based programming languages. If this is their first programming project, it is not necessary to jump directly into languages like Python or C++. What matters most is understanding the logic behind instructions and the code they are writing.

Even with simple block-based tools, students can build surprisingly complex things, and those tools are perfect for learning the foundations of programming.

Level design: this is basically about planning the player’s actions. The goal is to make sure the game can be completed, that it is not too hard or too easy, and above all that it is fun.

Here I recommend taking advantage of tools that already exist inside other games. For example, there is Mario Maker, which lets players create their own levels for a classic Nintendo game on Wii U and Switch. For PlayStation, I recommend the game Dreams. With tools like these, children can experiment with what kinds of obstacles and challenges feel exciting and what just feels frustrating.

What should students focus on during school?

It is hard to say that any subject would never be useful in a future role related to video game creation. Even geography could help when building the world of a game. But the most essential subjects are these:

Mathematics: math is everywhere in life, but video games are literally built from ones and zeros. Character movement, level systems, score, health bars, damage, all of that depends on mathematical thinking.

Physics: without physics, you cannot calculate your character’s jump, decide whether a projectile moves in a straight line or a parabola, or determine how fast things should fall. Even if your goal is to break the laws of physics inside the game, you first have to understand what those laws are.

Programming: even if someone does not want to be the programmer and instead wants to be a graphic designer or level designer, they still need to understand what is technically possible through code in order to design animations or levels that can actually work inside a game.