5. Start With A Model
Mesh: A 3D model, everything from tables to tyrannosaurs. Storyboarding, brainstorming ideas and sketching a few designs can be done best with a pen and paper, getting some ideas down in a sketchbook is very useful, (I tend to carry one around with me.) But there comes a point where your creations, locations or characters need to leap off you page and into the electronic world. Now's your chance to start thinking about how you want to digitise. You can go in two directions with graphics, 2D or 3D. I'm not really going to talk too much about 2D graphics in this article but if you're planning on doing 2D graphics most likely what you're thinking of is a Flash game. There are few different pieces of software out there to do this the most commonly used being Adobe Flash, which you can pick up a free trial of. However beware; the software itself is incredibly expensive. If you're keen on coming up with 3D graphics then the freeware "Blender" is a very powerful tool for picking up those flat little sketches of yours and bringing them to life. Getting to grips with meshing software can be an ordeal at first, there are a lot of different things you can do with this sort of kit. But, watch a few YouTube tutorials, read a few quickstart guides and you'll be up and running soon creating models for you to work with. It's worth mentioning too that if you have a university email address you can have a student copy of AutoDesk Maya, an otherwise very expensive piece of software that studios like Pixar use to model and animate their movies. It is a very extensive and clever piece of kit that if you can get access to I very much recommend. Another part of modelling is animation which Maya will handle excellently. Animation in games basically means that your mesh knows how to move, for example a walking animation when the user pushes a certain key or an idle animation when they are doing nothing. These are important for most but not all games and usually make things a lot more realistic.
Software to Check Out: Blender, AutoDesk Maya Student Edition