Until recently, programming was the crucial gatekeeper to making games. Early in the history of video games, the lead programmer was typically also the lead writer, artist, and designer. If you could program software, you could be a game creator. You may not have necessarily been able to craft a good game, but at least you could try. If you weren’t a programmer, you needed to find one. The advent of game-making tools like Klik & Play and Game Maker changed the landscape of game development drastically, putting less of a premium on programming and allowing all kinds of new people to make games.
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like Tricks of the Game-Programming Gurus in an effort to “make games the right way,” but when days of work yield as much as I could make in Game Maker in a few minutes, it’s hard to stay motivated. At the beginning of each semester at Berkeley I had the same sort of naive gumption, buying pristine notebooks and attentively jotting down everything the professors said, only to succumb to ennui a week later, my notes devolving into irreverent doodles. Post-school, however, I accepted that I wasn’t cut out for academia and programming theory. I no more wanted to program my own game engine than I wanted to fashion my own paintbrushes. This important realization meant I could stop wasting my time trying to be something I wasn’t. Instead of being embarrassed about not being a “real programmer” using “real programming languages,” I vowed to make games whichever way felt good to me.
