Resources and the Game Developer Community

Welcome to the game developer community! Video game development combines storytelling, visual and auditory art, and technical skills to create expansive, interactive experiences, and game developers are as diverse in their backgrounds and goals as the games themselves.

Collaboration in Game Development

Game development is an unusually collaborative art form. Because there are so many different skills involved in making games, and because so many people learned these skills on their own, people are extremely willing to support other creators, and help them learn and improve.

Game Jams

Another benefit of the multimedia and interactive aspect of making games is that it lends itself to working in teams. Game jams are timed game development challenges, often competitions, usually around a theme that isn’t announced until the jam starts.

Game jams are an excellent opportunity to collaborate on a project in a team of lots of different experience levels, and are one of the fastest ways to develop experience in making lots of different games.

• Ludum Dare is a well known game jam that happens twice a year.
• Global Game Jam  is another massive game jam that happens once a year, with another jam for younger developers, Global Game Jam Next
• Itch.io hosts dozens of game jams at any given moment, and can be source of inspiration to make more games or challenge yourself to try out a new genre or style.

Connect with Creators

Game development involves a huge array of different skills, and almost every game developer has had to learn something new on their own. That means that for almost every challenge you encounter, there is someone who has dealt with the same problem and may be able to help you through it.

Forums

Forums are a great place to find discussions of ideas and features that can be implemented in every game development community. Start by searching for keywords related to your question to find any answers that are already out there, and then feel free to post.

The Core Creator Forums has frequently asked questions, discussions about projects, places to suggest new features, and a space to showcase your work.

Discord

Discord is a chat, voice, and screen sharing app that has been a favorite among gamers to communicate in multiplayer games, as well as for developers to discuss and show off their work. To use it, join a Discord server, which is just a collection of voice and text discussion rooms (called channels related to a particular subject.

The Core Creator Discord is a discord server for everyone developing in Core which includes channels for different languages, announcements about what is coming up in Core and events for the community, as well as a way to connect with other creators to ask for help and coordinate playtests.

Other Resources

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is a huge event that brings members of all parts of the game development community together to share their knowledge and experiences. Many GDC talks are available on their YouTube channel. In particular, you can find postmortems of games you might be familiar with, where the developers discuss the process of making the game, all the difficult choices they had to make, and the things they learned from making them.

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell is an excellent resource for anyone in game development, that uses different angles of looking at a game (the “lenses”), to help you figure out how to design and improve them.