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hey i'm me and i wanna make video games but don't know how

A good start would be to make a level for VVVVVV or Knytt Stories. There's several reasons for this, such as:

These editors have a lot of flexibility, so there's a wide range of ideas you can use.
No programming knowledge required.
The audience already exists.
Plenty of other levels available for inspiration and understanding.
You can spend as much or as little time as you like.

It's better to start slowly and have something to show, rather than starting with a massive project that ultimately fails. Trust me, I know!

You can also learn a lot from playing games and giving feedback.

When you venture into making your own games, I would recommend releasing versions as soon as possible. This is because feedback and suggestions from people are extremely valuable and encouraging. I only had an overall goal with my current project, so all the feedback I'm getting is dictating the direction. People come up with ideas that are far better than anything I could imagine. Sharing ideas before implementing them is a great way to improve them, because people will say they like/dislike different aspects and give suggestions. So the ideas are improved and no time has been wasted.

Above all though, never neglect the other parts of your life in the pursuit of making games. Especially as some of the best games were created from personal experiences. Friends, family and work/school are more important than making games.

Nice Let's Play! Thanks mint301 I'm very happy to see that you understand everything I was going for.

To answer your issues:

The part where you fall down has a map at the beginning, but I've noticed that a lot of people miss it. So I must have made it too subtle. If you look at this map of the level you can see how the the middle of the Premonition room relates to the rooms ahead. I did a few things to attempt to draw people's attention to the map (the room name, the lack of danger in the room, the matching background tiles), but it must not have been enough. I'm just an amateur, so a few mistakes are expected :)

Diagonal floors are great! I have some in my house.

I've only seen one person complete room 8,7 with my intended solution, so I like that people have made their own path.

Several rooms use floating spikes, although they usually represent something (eyes, flames...) whereas the floating spikes in the room near the end don't represent anything, so I understand your dislike of those. I originally tried having platforms, but they took up a bit too much room and they interfered with the background art.

I wrote another campaign a long while back in my VVVVVV tribute game, called YYYYYY. My campaign is called Fading Away.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Makes me very happy to see you all enjoying it

It was a massive honour to be part of VVVVVV 2.0 and I had a lot of fun making my level. I hope you all enjoy it

My level was designed to be strongly themed and relatively low difficulty.

The awesome music for this level is Potential For Anything by Souleye.

Wow, that was unexpected! I'm very happy to see it get featured Thanks for your comment on the page, Terry :)

TheBrass: Aye :) I like Herocore a lot and the blockyness of the character was perfecting for recreating  in YYYYYY. There's a few other references to indie games around...

I just have to post this video of someone playing YYYYYY:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV8dH9Lrv4w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NYfEGoG8T8

Ooo it's definitely worth giving it a proper go. I even got one of my non-indie-game playing friends to complete it... twice!

I think it's a great example of replay value in a game. Normally you would play through the game killing everything, but it can also be played without killing anyone. You unlock/upgrade different abilities, allowing you to play in different ways. There's a variety of weapons. The levels are complex and have secret areas. There's a lot of story to read and it subtly changes based on your actions.

[Iji]

I think the screenshot shows Iji, who is an anomaly in the story and is even called an anomaly in the game.

It's been a long while since I played Iji, so I could be completely misunderstanding this!

Thanks for reminding me guys. I've now put all the campaigns with the original game, which can be downloaded here.

If you ever want to change your campaigns, just let me know and I'll update the download accordingly.

@arcticwolf15 - I made a slight change to room 2 in your campaign, with the cake and candles words. The game was getting confused, because all the words were adjacent. I've removed a couple of the words and it's all working correctly now.

Sounds good. I like the robots idea, because it'll provide a lot of variety and potential interactions. I also like the idea of dismantling robots to create new inventions.

I have a few questions, which I'm mostly asking to promote discussion of the available options:

What genre will it be? The robots idea is versatile, so I'm thinking it could be a puzzle, stealth, or action game, or a combination of those. Perhaps each level could have a different genre focus.

What do you think the best view is? I appreciate you initially wanted to make a platformer, but there might be merits to a top-down game instead. I think either could work successfully.

Would it be worth removing the water aspect of the game? Since this is you returning to making games, I think it would be best to keep it simple and focus on the parts that you are really motivated to make. The water doesn't affect the gameplay much, so I'd be very tempted to remove it. An alternative would be to show the floor number on each level, in a similar way that Portal shows the test chamber number.

And I have one suggestion, too, if it's not too much game-breaking trouble. I'd love to see platforms that move perpendicular to their own.. axis, rather than parallel. Like a horizontal platform that moves up and down, or a vertical one that moves left to right. That would open up some possibilities. Other than that, I really can't think of anything you could add or make better within the limitations of the format!

Good idea! Unfortunately that's probably going to be very complicated, but I'll look into it and let you know.

Actually, it could be very easy. Simply program it to have one tile for each direction. The only problem with this is that old levels may need conversion.

It's the code to move the platforms that is super-complicated. It handles platforms going off one side and appearing on the other side, along with platforms bashing into each other and most complicated of all... room rotation! Coming back to it after all this time makes it look fairly incomprehensible

On a more positive note, I have all the design iterations for every room in Fading Away campaign, so if anybody would like to see the design process of a room and have me ramble on about it, just ask!

Interesting! I'll write a proper reply, but I wanted to clarify one thing before I do that:

I'm probably misunderstanding, but are you saying the levels would be about manipulating robots and the water wouldn't be involved? The water is only contained in the elevator and is there for the story, rather than the game mechanics?

I like lazer bomb's idea of changing the environment, along with your idea of flooding an area with water.

A few years ago I started writing a game where this happened. It was a turn-based puzzle platformer, where you had to escape a flooding cave. The cave was an abandoned research laboratory, so there was plenty of opportunity to manipulate the water. You could use switches to open doors, which would redirect the water. You could freeze the water, so it would stay regardless of changes to the environment. You could heat up the water to make it evaporate.

The protagonist was a spider, so he could crawl up walls and then drop down from ceilings using his spindley webs, which acted as ladders. The interface was super-simple, it was just ascii characters and the controls were the arrow keys.

You've got my approval! As long as I didn't use any crewmate names/colors that were taken or just plain bad. I didn't do any research there...

Thanks Rox! Any crewmate names/colours are okay.

And I have one suggestion, too, if it's not too much game-breaking trouble. I'd love to see platforms that move perpendicular to their own.. axis, rather than parallel. Like a horizontal platform that moves up and down, or a vertical one that moves left to right. That would open up some possibilities. Other than that, I really can't think of anything you could add or make better within the limitations of the format!

Good idea! Unfortunately that's probably going to be very complicated, but I'll look into it and let you know.

Hey

Sorry I've been gone for so long. I kinda overloaded on programming and had to distance myself from it.

It's great to see people are still enjoying the game. Welcome to the thread Rox :)

I've been playing through all the campaigns and they are fantastic! I am very impressed. Seeing people create campaigns makes me really happy.

With your approval I would love to include these campaigns directly within YYYYYY, so people get them automatically when they download the game. Would you guys like that?

If anyone has suggestions for the game or editor, please do let me know. I can't promise anything big, because I haven't looked at the code for a long time. It can be confusing to return to it, especially with a project this big. Any small changes might be okay though.

Robson