I’ve mentioned a few indie games during my blogging days. Most recently, World of Goo last week. However, playing all those games, might have put a killer game idea in your head and have given you an appetite to become an indie developer yourself. In this posts, there are 13 links to get you started in game development. It’s focused on getting started, but I’m sure even the more advanced developer will certainly find something worthwhile.
Open source games
Those links serve 2 things: they will get you interested in what is possible. And if you are looking for a solution to a particular problem, you might find it in the code of those projects. Not all projects have good documentation, so real beginners might want to skip the code (but not the games!)
This is actually a “data pack” for the open sourced Quake 3 engine (see link below). But I thought I’d put it in to give you a taste of what you can accomplish even if you know very little about programming.
Without the original Quake3 data files, you won’t be able to do much with the files you will find on the site. A number of years ago, the Quake 3 engine was open sourced by ID. Since then, the guys at ioquake3 have been working on that code. Improving and expanding it to become the reference Quake 3 platform. OpenArena above is one thing you can do with it, but you can also take it and build something entirely new. It doesn’t even have to be an action game. The world is yours.
Just look at those screenshots. Impressive! It’s open source and judging by the amount of mods that are available, it’s also easy and popular to build on.
This is actually not an entirely finished game, but it already looks wonderful. Most importantly, this is a Java open source game. So if you’re affraid of diving into game development because you don’t want to learn C or C++, that excuse is now void.
Tutorial sites
Killer Game Programming in Java
If you prefer, also available on paper.
It isn’t updated as much as it used to be, but it’s still the reference to get started with OpenGL and to learn all advanced features.
No longer maintained, but the archive is so valueable, I just have to mention it.
The number of links here is endless. You might not even need any of the other sites.
General news sites
Miscellaneous graphics resources
Resources for Computer Graphics
If you’re looking for inspiration on the graphics front, this is the site to get a taste of the getting edge. There are links to a large number of papers published at many leading computer graphics conferences. This is the stuff that will take a few more years before you see it in games. So now is the time to jump on that wagon.
The holy grail of graphics programming is certainly realtime raytracing. Picture perfect images are incredibly hard, so check out OpenRT to get a taste of it.