Make Your Own Game

1. Creating the Basics

For this entire ‘Make Your Own Game’ series, led by instructor, Heath Close, we’re going to learn how to make a wall jumper game called ‘GLTCH’ from start to finish.

In this first lesson, a lot of information will be covered to provide you with a solid foundation to work with. We’ll explain exactly what Buildbox is and how you can use it to build your own game without using a single line of code.
Then you’ll get a detailed tour of the software’s options and settings, which will help you become more familiar with the features and editing tools that you’ll be using.

You’ll learn about the creator tool and how to use it to make a playable skeleton of your game ‘GLTCH.’ We’ll also cover how to use the scene editor to customize your game with different backgrounds, characters menu screen graphics and more.

2. Collision Shapes and
Object Settings

Although, we’re not going to start building levels until part 3 of the ‘Make Your Own Game’ series, everything that you’ll learn in this video will give you a good basic knowledge of level design. Understanding the components necessary to make a game app flow correctly will ultimately make the process much easier when you’re actually building out levels in your game.

In this course we’ll explain what are collision shapes and how they affect your game’s gameplay. You’ll learn how to use the options available in the collision shape editor to resize, add points, and reset an image.

You’ll learn how to change object properties to get an enemy to behave how you want them to within your game. We’ll also reveal how to make a game more fun by designing it in a way that let’s players experience those exciting ‘close-call moments’ without ever feeling cheated.

3. Build Your First Levels

As discussed in the previous lesson, we’re going to take a closer look at world settings and how they affect your game. In this video we’ll show you how to customize and edit your world settings to make your levels interesting. You’ll learn how to play around with various properties to adjust the gravity, time warp, bounce settings and more within your game.

We’ll also further explain the different character gameplay settings, the art of layering and how to test out your levels in the debug mode.

In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll get to watch and follow along with the instructor as you build the first game level in ‘GLTCH’ together. There’s a bonus time-lapse segment that plays immediately after of 10 more levels being built. Pay attention and watch closely to learn how to effectively build out levels.

4. Making it Unique

Our goal in this course is to help you create a game that could potentially be featured by Apple or reach the top the charts. To accomplish this, you have to make your game unique. There are hundreds of games released on a regular basis across every single platform. This makes originality crucial for not only visibility in the App Store but overall player engagement.

In this fourth video of the ‘Make Your Own Game’ series, you’ll learn how to make a game app that’s truly unique. We’ll go beyond graphics and explore game characters and the way they interact. Watch and learn as we add a new gameplay element to ‘GLTCH’ to set our game apart enough to make it memorable and fun.

You’ll learn how to add a barrier obstacle into your gameplay and a new way to add a fun twist to the element. We’ll also show you how to easily create a ‘taking damage’ animation in Buildbox.

5. Actions Effects and Logic

In this fifth video tutorial, we’ll cover actions, effects and logic pieces in-depth. You’ll learn how to add actions like coins, invincibility, power-up magnets and action animations.

Creating an in-game economy with coins and other actions such as power-ups is an excellent way to give your players goals and reward them. When you make your own game with this in mind your overall gameplay experience and player retention will be much higher. The option to collect coins also empowers users to unlock characters and other special items you decide to include, which can lead up to an in-app purchase generating real money.

We’ll cover how to import coins for players to collect, how to add a coin tracker to your game’s UI, invincibility power-ups and the use of path logic pieces.

You’ll also learn how to add beautiful light effects and particle effects in creative ways to make your game look really professional.

6. Animated Menus and
Game Sounds

No game is complete without music or sound effects. Music and sound are principal elements in gaming. Good background music sets the atmosphere and tone. It can help users connect emotionally with the game as well. Sound effects at crucial moments or during specific actions can inform players and give them direction on the next move to make.

In this lesson we’ll cover how to not only animate the menu sections like the game title or start button but how to load music into your game and trigger specific sound and animation effects. You’ll learn new ways to integrate sound and music throughout your game.

When you’re a game developer it’s important to get your music and sound effects in your game just right. So, included in this lesson is also some bonus material that focuses on how to add defeated sounds and animations properly to your game over menu. The secret to making a good game great is in the details, like sound and effects.

7. Making Multiple Game
Modes

Balance is crucial when you make a game app. You don’t want your game to be too easy but at the same time you don’t want to make it so hard right off the bat, that your players feel cheated. It’s important to find a balance. This can be easily managed when you implement multiple game modes.

In this lesson you’ll learn how to make a game with multiple game modes for your players to choose from. Watch and learn how to make an exciting turbo mode and a hard mode all within Buildbox.

You’ll also learn how to make multi-level menu navigation for ‘GLTCH’ that can be used to navigate players to the new game modes. We’ll show you how to add locked start buttons and share a few tips to make the entire process of adding multiple modes into your game super easy and quick.

8. Coin Shop and Multiple
Characters

Adding coin shops with unlockable characters and items can significantly improve your game’s replay value. Players are more likely to continue playing in order to earn enough coins to purchase or unlock a new cool wacky character that may have caught their eye. It’s also a great way to ease monetization options like in-app purchases into the mix.

In this video, we’re going to show you exactly how to set up and customize a coin shop. We’ll also explore what you can put in your game shop and different ways for players to buy characters.

You’ll learn how to add character purchasing features to your shop, and we’ll explain the various character settings available further as well. The lesson will also teach you how to add unlock buttons to each item or character for advanced monetization later down the line.

There’s also a really effective trick included in this lesson on creating multiple characters via duplication that will make it easy to fill up your shop with unique unlockable characters.

9. Exporting

After you make your own game it’s vital that you take the time to review and prepare it for exporting. In this lesson we’ll further explain the settings options and explore the general tab section.

You’ll learn how to get your game ready for export and all the necessary information you need to fill out to get your app up and running in your chosen platform’s marketplace.

With Buildbox you can easily export your game to any platform including Android, Windows, iOS, Mac, Steam, Apple TV and more. Our game engine also automatically adjusts button and interface positions as needed for different devices so your game will look great on any device family you choose to export it to.

In this brief tutorial you’ll learn how easy it is to fill out the necessary information, choose export target, and let Buildbox automatically export all files in code for compiling in the platform of your choice.

10. Tips Tricks and Hacks

Now that you know how to make a game app without coding, we’re going to backtrack and reveal some of the best tips and hacks to get the most out of our software. We’ll revisit some of our previous lessons and show you a few new tricks to help take your game to that next-level.

In this last video, you’ll learn a clever tip to get your collision shapes precise. We’ll show you how to give your character an exploding death, so it looks like he shatters into tiny little versions of himself.

We’ll explore some of the other notable features in Buildbox like the menu jump and event observer and show you how you can integrate timers within your gameplay. You’ll also learn a secret tip about making secret worlds unrepeatable.

After you’ve completed the tenth and final video in our course series, we encourage you to join our official forum to learn more about how to make your own game using Buildbox.

BONUS: POLISHING YOUR GAME

There’s one more aspect of creating games that we haven’t covered yet in this series. Polishing your game. Virtually every successful game is polished in one way or another. In this special bonus video we’ll teach you exactly what polish is and how to properly add it to your game.

We’ll reveal some of the late stage design decisions we made with GLTCH and provide some core tips that you can use to build your own game. We’ll cover several effective strategies to use when you’re adding the final touches to your app to make it appear more polished. You’ll also learn the steps necessary to make your game publisher ready.

Polishing your game is all about finding that perfect balance between minimal and simple but sleek. Throughout this bonus video from the Make Your Own Game series you’ll learn a faster way to make design decisions. Watch and follow along as we clean up the UI of GLTCH.

We’ll share some essential game design principles like elegance and tips that you can use to make your own game appear more minimal yet sleek. You’ll also learn the most important rule you need to follow in order to make your game publisher ready and much more.