Tutorial:Making_your_first_game - hpgDesigns/hpgdesigns-dev.io GitHub Wiki
Making your first game can be a daunting task for someone who's never even seen the interface before. Fortunately, we're here to help, with tutorials and explanations of the interface.
Before you proceed with this, you need to first ensure that you have Installed ENIGMA (which usually comes packaged with LateralGM already). Don't forget to also follow the instructions for Install#Compiling a sample game to make sure that everything works and to get that nasty first-build wait-time out of the way. Once you have done that, you may either press the New Game button, or close LateralGM altogether and start it up again later when you're ready.
Your next step will probably depend on what type of learner you are.
- If you like going by the book or like reading technical manuals, jump down to the #Interface section.
- If you like to tinker with examples and try to improve on existing engines, the #Examples section is the place for you.
- If you want to create a game from scratch via walkthrough or tutorial, check out or #Tutorials section.
- As a kind of hybrid between tutorials and existing engines, #Staged tutorials provide you with an example file every few steps of the way, so you can check your work or start up in the middle.
Tutorials
Tutorials are a great way to learn the process of creating a game from scratch and to take a guided tour of some of the more important features of the software. The two most common types of tutorials are [#Video] and [#Text] (which oftentimes show images).
Text
- First game:Balloon pop In the genre of Top-Down Side-Scrolling Shooters, we walk you through the simple game of popping incoming balloons.
Video
No video tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you should make your own and contribute back to this wiki!
Staged
There aren't many staged tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you should make your own and contribute back to this wiki!
- Adding an achievement system to your games.
Examples
There are two kinds of examples that you can tinker with. The first and most obvious type is a free-range example, where you're given a well-documented example file, and then you can modify it in whatever way you want. Since these are a dime a dozen, instead of listing them all here, instead you can find them at Examples. The kind of examples that this section deals with, however, is the more guided kind of example where you get the example file and a tutorial to show you some of the things you can do with it.
No guided tutorials are available at this time. Maybe you should make your own and contribute back to this wiki!
Interface
There's nothing wrong with wanting to read manuals that show you how the interface works. Some of us don't learn by blindly following a set of mouse clicks - we want to know "what's that button supposed to do?" and "What are all these other things for?" and how to navigate the interface in general.
In fact, you can learn a lot of things about the interface that tutorials and examples don't mention, like the different ways to do the same thing, shortcuts, the names of components, and parts of the interface that you didn't even know existed. With this, you can do more advanced things, you can do things quicker, and you can become a power user, fully utilizing every facet of the software. All you have to do is sit down and read, with plenty of neat pictures and diagrams to help make the experience more pleasant. With that kind of power, you could even contribute back by writing your own tutorials, helping answer people's questions (e.g. on the Forums), finding bugs, tweaks, or suggestions to improve the program, or better organizing the wiki and adding missing information.
Speaking of organizing the wiki, we're so disorganized, we don't even know what pages to recommend you to first!
Maybe start with LateralGM, and Resource tree.