When anyone starts liking games really much, they start thinking something like "Hey, I would've added this here...". It's really nice realizing how much you could've done for a game you love, and as a programmer I can tell, is quite hard telling yourself "Ok.. never mind, now I get why they didn't do it... makes complete sense". Making games is, honestly, HARD. It is not basically Fun, but rather tiring and time consuming.The fruits of your hard work, though, make you feel like it was all worth it. When you start a game, you have this empty screen that is of no help to you. You start getting assets, sprites,sounds and more and the game starts looking like a game. You put this here, then add some behavior and BAM! something completely new happens. Sometimes you get awful errors, but I have to tell you, that's the most fun to fix.. When something unexpected happen, all I do is laugh. For example, When I started making the Dragon Ball Z game on Unity 3D, Goku, for some reason, used to fall through the platform. I had many laughs with it, though at some point it got frustrating.
Making games, is, overall, awesome, but not because you like video games, you like making them. There's a real difference in playing and making them. If you think you like to make them, you can start by trying Scratch, a visual based framework that will let you create simple to medium complexity games without writing a single line of code. Is quite limited, but if you get to learn it you can do really cool stuff. Start by making something like a pong, then maybe a snake and so on. If you like it that way, you may like it when coding.
The last point I'd like to touch, is that, sometimes, coding seems way easier than everything else. Finding Open source sprites, sounds and graphics that adjust your liking is not easy, and a big idea without great art just seems like a small one. Artists are really important when it comes to game development, so do not ever think of their work as easy or worthless. They are the ones that makes your game come really alive. You can code a box that behaves just like a superhero. It can fly, it can walk, it can move and attack... but is nothing more than a box. Take a great character and make him do the same and you will instantly realize that is just not the same to have the same code on a box and on a cool dude with a leather suit.
Thanks a lot for reading and I really hope you enjoy the article. It was really nice writing about it, and I may write a bit more when I have some free time. Hope you're having a nice Christmas, have fun!! :)
