But what does it take to make a video game? Well, you need game art, programming, and decent game design. There are different solutions for the game art, there are different compilers for the programming, but the game engine is what holds it all together.

The problem is that game engines are notoriously difficult to work with. Generally, they are poorly documented. Game engines grew up in an environment where the engine was proprietary to a small development team, the programmers who understood the engine could communicate face-to-face with the game artists, and any issues in getting the art to walk and behave properly in the game engine were resolved by this well-integrated team.

But when these game engines began to be used by the masses of independent developers, problems cropped up. No documentation. Or, no good documentation. And even when the documentation was decent, there were gaps between what was written down and what the artist or designer wanted to do.

I know one developer out here (in Sweden) who used a well-known engine for a client to do a simulation, and found that not only was there no good documentation, but the support was almost non-existent. And when they finally paid through the nose for help, the answers to their questions were hard to believe. For example, the mechanism for importing a certain type of game art was to hit control + shift + tilde or something like that, and it wasn't even written down anywhere! After a few weeks of trying to solve a particularly painful problem with this undocumented engine, this game artist I know said "Well, there's nothing to do now but go home and get drunk!". That's a pretty sad statement on the state of game engine documentation.

But it doesn't have to be that way! You can benefit from the hard-learned experience of others, such as myself. I went through six months of trial and error before finally understanding and writing down exactly how to get the Torque game engine to do what I wanted in regards to game art. My book "Creating Game Art for 3D Engines" is not the only book on the Torque engine out there, but it is the most clear and direct as concerns the subject of creating the game art properly, and getting it into the engine so that it is scripted right, and "comes to life" in the engine the way you want it to.

So don't enter the field of game development lightly; it is not easy - if it was, more people would be doing it. And it you do decide to create a game, make sure you have the documentation to get the job done - without good documentation (like my book - plug, plug), you too may end up drowning your sorrows in a beer!