Want to know how to make a game? Here's the entire process in about six minutes...

You've probably thought about designing your own game. You may have already dreamed up exactly what your bigger-than-Tetris game would look like and how it would work. You may have told your friends that it would be "like ICO and Gears of War combined," and then told their stupid, skeptical faces, "Whatever, you'd probably just have to play it to get it." 

We have. And then we tinkered around for just long enough to find out that the whole thing is really, really hard. But, of course, not everyone gives up so easily - we wouldn't have any games if it weren't for that super-motivated 1% always making us look bad. (Jerks.)

They're the kind of people who participate in competitions like Ludum Dare, which challenges creatives to design and produce complete games in only 48 hours. The events are held every four months, and require entrants to design, code, and illustrate simple games based on pre-set themes. Several of the daring programmers have recorded their entire processes and compressed them into time-lapsed tours of madness. Look, everything you need to know about game design! Yeah, it looks really, really hard:

The game in this video, created by Markus Persson, is naturally simplistic, but it's actually pretty fun if you give it a chance. And you can, because it's playable right here. And if you want to see more, there are plenty of other timelapse videos on YouTube. It's pretty mesmerizing...

...But we're still not planning to browse community college programming classes any time soon. Damn that looks hard and stuff. But if you are feeling the motivation, and lack experience, we put together a guide a while back which offers a bunch of great resources for aspiring designers. Get started now and who knows? Maybe you'll be the next [insert your favorite game designer here].

Aug 30, 2010