My brief career in online game design.

A few years ago I became involved in building an online game played through Facebook. This game was called Galactic Empires @ War or GE@W for short. The game was designed to be totally free to play with no little boosts or anything to buy.
The 3 of us had met online playing another space game, the programer lived in Germany, the Community Dev in Scotland and I was to rework the artwork and I live in England. As such we had never met.

The aim of the game was simple, you started with a planet and had to build up your infrastructure and a fleet. then you expanded onto other planets and could raid to bring in other resources to help you build up your empire. You could form alliances with other players or go to war and destroy each other.

Being put in charge of doing the new artwork I went out to look for a free to use CAD program and found Blender. I'd never used a CAD program in my life so set about teaching myself the basics via youtube tutorials. Over a couple of months I learned the basics of lighting, manipulating shapes and joining them and began to create the ships I needed.

Below are 3 of the finished images I created.

Stardock.

Probe.

Light Cruiser.

Now the game was up at the time and we had about 100 or so people playing and helping us find and fix bugs in the programing and all seemed to be going well. That was until our programer had to go back to China for family reasons. A couple of weeks turned into months and we struggled on to keep the game going. The artwork was ready but we couldn't upload it to the game. As bugs were found I started looking at the coding and even though I knew nothing about it managed to work out how to fix a couple of issues.

Then Facebook made some change to what programs or something could be used. (like I say I don't understand computers and codes.) and as a result the game could no longer be acessed and it died.

Now at that time I'd started writing my story The Alienbutt Saga so the upside was I now had a large stockpile of images of ships to use for making covers and promotional material. My flirtation with online game design ended up with me creating my own bookcovers.

Thanks for reading about how I almost became a games designer.

Very impressive that you can build your own game.

I just did some artwork and helped things run, it was the programer who did the hard work.

Head up, bro, you can use construct2 to create a simple PC/Mac/Web or Android game with almost NO coding. take a look into Contruct2 - a lot of people with no-skill in coding made a great games.

Good luck!

My son has started a college course on Game Designing so I'm hoping to pick his brains or work with him on one.

Yes, it can be a good idea. But, I recommend to research for good tools to make videogames without (or with minimal) coding. It really brings a lot of fun ;)

Wow, I'm impressed - I didn't realize you did your own book covers; that's awesome!

Well I had all the images so it made sense and saved money as well.

Great images. I used to love those kind of games too. Right back till the dark pre internet data of games by post. Ah the good old days!

Thanks, I did use to spend alot of time playing those games, never did the games by post though. you should write a post about them and how you played.

I fear it would exclude my true age to the younglings that cluster around this platform ;0) Pre internet?! Whut?! Like medieval?

My ex brother-in-law is a Graphic Designer who worked for Acclaim Studios in Austin, TX for years, then he and my sister moved to Champaign, Illinois where he has been working for Volition. He designs the background art in many popular video games and is very well-paid for his work.

I don't speak to him any more, but I'm sure the two of you would have a lot of interesting things to converse about. He is not on Steemit, yet.

I think his ability would be far above my humble skills.