How to Make Your Own Video Game

If you’ve played games long enough, you’ve surely thought, “Hey, what if Imade a game?” Problem is, you don’t have a fancy computer science degree. You don’t know JavaScript from Fortran, and you wouldn’t recognize an art pipeline if somebody hit you over the head with one.

Making games isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy 35 years ago when Warren Robinett was writing machine code to cram Atari 2600 Adventure into 4 kilobytes of memory, and it isn’t any easier now that 300-person teams are spending millions to create incredibly complex 3D worlds with the latest in bleeding-edge graphics and animation techniques.

But if you can set your sights a bit lower than Halo 5, there are tons of resources out there to help you turn your playful dreams into a reality. These days, game-making software is practically a cottage industry. The first thing to do is find the right tool for the job. Start with these five.