Age

#1 You're never to young. If you can play them, you can make them.

#2 I'd caveat that with "you have to be old/mature enough to understand that product relies on experience". I still remember being 16 and KNOWING that I could design and build games that were thousands of times better than what I was playing currently. I'm 36 now, and I'm finally ready to just begin to try.

#3 Never hurts to start early. ;) I remember my first game - a racing game in 2D that was created with ASCII and scrolling. Was fun to build, and I was SO proud when I got it to work. It was a VERY simple program, but hey - I was about 12, using an old Radio Shack color computer.

Build games because you enjoy doing it though. If you do, it's at the least a great hobby, and who knows - maybe even eventually a career. ;)

#4 Old enough to know you can't do it all ;)

#5 Good answer

#6 .

#7 I tried to program "The Hobbit" on a TI99/4a at the age of 9... I haven't changed much...

-Josh Ritter
Technical Director
Prairie Games, Inc

#8 I tried a Gauntlet clone when I was about 12 or so... Had an old PCjr and GWBasic...

You can start learning very young, I think, as long as you understand that there's no chance of fame and fortune in it. Dellusions of granduer usually get in the way of effective game development work ;)

#9 At the age of about 4, I was debugging (so to speak) edu-games that my father wrote for the ZX Spectrum, and even wrote some simple nonsense that was amusement to me, but not really a game (for others).

I created about 3-4 board games that were played amongst schoolmates at around the age of 8. Mostly snake and ladder style.

I wrote and completed an ASCII version of arkanoid without bricks, complete with 10 levels, PC internal speaker sound and music, at the age of 14. That was on an old IBM AT with QBASIC.

Then after a long 15 year hiatus for developing more 'serious' applications, and a decisive job change, I wrote a series of games, 1 in Torque, but most for J2ME, in the last few months, none taking longer than 3-4 weeks.

Experience can be good, in the sense that you learn not to bite of more than you can chew. The best way to gain experience is to bite of more than you think you can chew, because the weakness of experience is that you tend to bite off much less than what you can really take on, and end up in the cesspit of mediocrity. No venture, no gain!

Key to success? Dare to fail! (and don't be surprised if/when it happens)

#10 In 7th grade (I was 12) we had a marketplace day in our grade where everyone had to sell things and try to make money (with play money). The winner was the business with the most money at the end of the day. People did stuff like bake cookies or sell candy. I wrote a slot machine game on an Apple ][. The whole grade gambled their money away, and I walked away not only the winner but the only one with any money at all.

It was then that I realized that there's big money in game development. (just kidding -- the rest is true though)

#11 Hehe, seems to me there is big money in gambling tho ;)

#12 Your never too young to start. It doesn't mean you'll make anything great, or anything that will sell, but atleast you will learn the knowledge and gain experience along the way. And with enough time, effort, and dedication you eventually will get to where you want to be. Even if it is a long hard road.

Never give up.

-Jase

#13 Yes, i agree, never too young to start. Though being older of age has one big advantage: You've seen more, and got a bit more creative since your 10th birthday, so to speak. But simple games, like mathemetics games etc. could be good practice for the smaller ones :)

#14 To me, that's like asking at what age you should begin to draw. Granted, when it comes to games, there's much more than just sitting down to doodle. There are technical, scientific, psychological, and artistic abilities that go into game development, as well as others, and if you can grasp the knowledge of what's needed, how to draw the lines, there's no reason why you couldn't pick up a pencil and try. A nice cash flow could help, too!

As for cheap game engines, TGE is more than satisfactory, though with a rather heightened learning curve. I've also used DarkBasic before, same price - www.darkbasic.com

Bwaw!

- Ronixus

#15 My little brother is 11 and makes some pretty sick crap with the Dark engine series. Going to visit my parents this weekend just to see what hes been upto ...

#16 I've been writing games on and off since I was about 10 on a Spectrum.. I seem to remember being able to write a game in very little time. Took longer when I started using Assembler but not a great amount longer.
These days, it takes a lot more effort. Not just coding, but planning, designing, art, level designing.. then all the stuff that adds polish to the game.. That's not to say I finished every game I started.. I had 2 asm based games, one shooter and one platformer which I had to abandon due to the idea being bigger than the hardware's capabilities. (and my design skills at the time)

In the last 5 years, I have started 4 games in the hope of finishing them, got into trouble around the 3/4 mark and had to abandon the projects.

1xVisual Basic Chaos clone
2xPascal & SDL 2D games (including an entire object framework)
1xTorque powered Diablo style adventure.

Now I'm 32 and trying to fit working on my latest game with a full time job and a relationship, But with a much simpler design.. there are still many hurdles but the basics are simple. But it's not easy. I'm having better luck getting support for this design too so maybe the game is a more realistic stab as an Indi game and has a better chance of success.

Hope so anyway.

I believe that some games fail and some succeed. Never give up and eventually, you'll finish one and it'll be awesome.

#17 Well, I'm 15 now, but I started (in BASIC) when I was about 8.

Those were the days... making crazy text-based adventures to which the plots made little or no sense.

#18 I like this thread enough to revive it...

I, like the previous poster, was making text-adventure games when I was under 10. Me & my mom got C64 magazines & would type in games based off those & make our own. They were short & easy, but fun (well, for being a little kid).

I'd say text adventures were the best because, just like books, you could use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Once we got sprites & 3d graphics you didn't use your imagination any more because you say it. The images conjured up in my head from the text descriptions in Suspended are still burned in there... :)

#19 Wow, I can not believe the number of people that started on a spectrum. I did too....first game was a nifty little top down shooter based on Rambo First Blood Part II. It sucked as bad as the movie did. He He. Then moved on to the Commodore 64 and all kinds of crappy sprite based things. Now I am in my later 30's and I am still making games. Funny how making games now seems like A LOT more work than it used too :-)

#20 Go Specky!

I started making text adventures in '83 when I was 10. Made a super-basic, non-scrolling, shoot'em-up a year later (almost fried my brain).

Thanks to modern computers and software (like Torque), making games is a lot more user friendly than it used to be.