Before you even begin, bear at the back of your mind. You just can’t wake up one morning to try this, as a Junior level Developer or someone new to game dev. It’s suicide, please don’t. Though as a junior level developer, you can also try this sha, what won’t kill you will make you..whatever they say it is.
How Do I Go About Making A GTA Game?
Research
Do your research, having an eye for details and observation is a plus. Observe how certain mechanics interact, piece them apart and research them extensively. For instance, the Player movements and camera orientation, these are unique on their own or The weather system, day and night cycle. Piece them apart, divide and conquer.
Hardware Power
Hardware Power - your machine, PC or Desktop is everything. Just imagine using using a Pentium 2GB Ram PC to run GTA 4 or 5? Game Engines draw as much processing and graphics memory as the actual games. But in this case, making an AAA game like Vegas, will require a minimum of Core 2 Duo, 8GB Ram and a Dedicated memory(VRAM) of 700MB be it Nvidia or AMD. Or better still run it on a Core i3 8GB RAM with GPU >= 256MB.
How Do You Want To Achieve It?
This part is what determines how fast you can cut close to achieving it in 6 Weeks. What would be faster?
- An already made template to build on? See templates as how Web Developers see their Framework like Tailwind, React, Bootstrap, etc. Thats what templates are to Game Devs.
Through Visual Scripting? - For those that are allergic to writing codes, Visual Scripting is another way fast pace way to bring a game to life. There are Visual Scripting Frameworks for Unity like Playmaker, GameMaker, and Bolt. I personally prefer Playmaker, I’m still learning it.
Through Codes - This is a more direct approach and I adore people who do it this way. If this is your forte, you should be fast paced and equally fast like the other options above. How I do it? At times, I combine Visual Scripting and Raw Codes together to get things done . Although I fell in love with using templates of recent.
3 . Assets & Resources - these cannot be overemphasized. You need assets for your games. In this case, you need,
Environments - houses and bushes and cars sometimes come with an environment asset. You can get them online at Unity Asset Store, Game Dev Market, or other 3D Modelling sites.
Characters - if you’re a 3D Modeler, this should be easy to model characters for your game. But if you’re like me with no experience of 3D Modeling. Omoo, download Character packs from Unity Asset Stores or any online sites. Or if you want a software that does it, check out Adobe Fuse or iClone.
- Sounds - Music, People Shouting, name it.. you need it as well.
Lastly, 3 things make up GTA, or Gangster Vegas or their likes.
i. People - AI pedestrians working on the streets.
ii. Ability to Steal Cars
iii. A Police System. The rest is up to you.