Back in November I mentioned I was working through FutureLearn’s game course. That never quite worked out, alas. It was an oddly pitched course, simultaneously focusing on complex and boring infrastructure stuff while being really basic in the creative areas. Lots of other people clearly loved it, but it didn’t click with me.
AND THEN TOM FRANCIS HAPPENED.
Tom Francis made GUNPOINT. It’s a delightful indie game where you can jump through windows, punch people a lot, and rewire entire buildings to do crazy, emergent fun stuff. He made it in GameMaker, and recently started publishing tutorials on his YouTube channel.
They’re utterly great, pitched at just the right level for me. He dives straight in to doing creative, responsive stuff – aided I’m sure by the simplicity of getting up and running in GameMaker’s IDE, compared to the faff of working in Eclipse for Android development. The tutorials are a perfect blend of technical insight and game design analysis.
Crucially, Tom clearly remembers exactly what it’s like to know nothing at all. Highly technical people tend to have an inability to remember what it was like at the start of their learning (often because they started learning as kids, and thus have simply Always Known). Tom knows exactly what I want to know, and how to teach me it.
As such, it now looks entirely possible that I could have a proper, simple game of my own in existence before the end of the year. Which is hugely exciting.
If you’re interested in making games but have literally no idea how to do it, click here to check out his tutorials.
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