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Random question: is anyone working (or has anyone worked with) with either BlitzMax (or any Blitz Research tools) or Game Maker, or similar tools? I ask because I'm starting to take both of these for test drives and see what they can do for me, and I'd love to share notes, get pointers, and hear opinions on both. For those that don't know, both BlitzMax and Game Maker are relatively inexpensive game development tools. Here's some quick background information: BlitzMax includes a simple IDE and compiler toolchain for its BASIC-like language, all geared towards game development. Blitz Research makes BlitzMax, and also makes (or made, in the case of the discontinued offerings) the related products MaxGUI, Blitz3D, Blitz Plus, and Blitz Basic. BlitzMax itself focuses on 2D games, but is cross-platform and uses OpenGL. Some members of the community have worked on making a miniature 3D engine for it. Blitz3D would be the obvious choice for 3D work, but it's not cross-platform like BlitzMax is. BlitzMax is $80 USD. Game Maker, now in version 7 (and with new commercial backing from YoYo Games) is by Mark Overmars, a professor at the University of Utrecht. It's implemented in Delphi and was originally written as a teaching aid for his classes. It's mostly a drag-and-drop type of game creation tool/IDE, although it includes its own scripting language called GML, and allows you to write extensions, which can include DLLs. Game Maker Pro is about $20 USD. Game Maker games only work on Windows, as does Game Maker. 3D support is limited but there, based on Direct3D. Both BlitzMax and Game Maker can produce games as executables for the relevant platforms. Both tools have successfully been used to create popular (if not blockbuster), novel games, and both have development communities that are alive and talking. I've recently taken to investigating these two tools (for now; there's a list of other stuff to look at or come back to depending on how I get on with these) for some game ideas I have because I wanted to shorten the time between concept and creation, focus on gameplay, am not necessarily interested in 3D (though that may change later and/or depending on the game idea being developed), and because they seem to represent good value for money in those dimensions. I have some pre-existing (amateur) experience in game design and development, some experience with OpenGL (primarily related to making visualizations and demos), and lots of experience with AI, though no experience with "game programing" per se (not that I think this is much of an issue). There's obvious limits to using tools like these compared to more commonplace C++, SDL, Allegro, OpenAL, etc. toolchains, but for now I'd love to hear what people have to say about them. minidracula fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Jan 3, 2008 |
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Jan 3, 2008 07:42
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Femtosecond posted:I really want to get off my rear end and start programming some games, but I'm so conflicted about whether I want to A) get something up and running quickly and easily via XNA or B) go the more complex route and do something that I can later port to (or develop on) both platforms. I have a Macbook Pro, and I sort of want to maybe make something that can be on the Mac as well, but at the same time I feel that that would be much more complex with having to know about making interfaces for both Windows and OS X and as well having to deal with a less user friendly library (SDL most likely). I'm not sure what I should do. I'm not joking when I say you should check out BlitzMax. Cross-platform, fast, game-focused, and easy. But, unlike XNA, it's not free, though it is inexpensive given what it gives you. If you were going for something heavily 3D, then I might suggest otherwise (Blitz3D is available from the same company, though it's not cross-platform like BlitzMax), but there's an independently developed free 3D engine, MiniB3D, which is pretty awesome. I'm not sure yet how suitable it is for heavily 3D games; it might be more than enough. My bias: I bought both Game Maker and BlitzMax (with the MaxGUI add-on module) since cost was low, and the roundtrip time from idea to proof of concept to playable game is really short. I know how to program, but I wanted something focused and self-contained to start with, just so I can focus on experimenting and making games and not futzing with the technology.
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Mar 29, 2008 18:49
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Unormal posted:FMod (http://www.fmod.org/) seems to be a commonly used and solid library, that I've found very easy to integrate in the past.
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Jan 7, 2013 19:41
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Is there already a Unity megathread, and if not, would it make sense to create one? Several game devs here seem to be using Unity, with various amounts of experience and different types of projects. As a still beginning Unity tinkerer (not yet convinced I'm going to use it for any games I might release one day, but definitely using it for other non-traditional purposes, like experimenting with 3D and physics, VJ visuals, simulation, etc.), I'd love to be able to plug-in to the goon Unity dev (goonity?) hive mind in a dedicated thread, but only if others agree its worth making.
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Jan 21, 2013 21:01
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speng31b posted:Unity seems like a pretty engineering-centric culture where they've basically just continuously piled on more engineers with the resources their success has afforded them, so it's sort of natural they see every problem as a nail that needs to get whacked on the head by a giant hammer made of engineers. They reinvent wheels because they built an organization full of people who like doing that. xzzy posted:Everyone knows that all tools suck, so we'd better invest thousands of hours making our own tool because this time it'll be different! Which, you know, might work out well, but suffice to say I'm mostly interested in watching that effort from the sidelines as a spectator for now.  On the other hand, writing your own tools is also pretty common in the games biz in general, so regardless of whether Unity has the culture described above, I'm not too surprised that it bleeds over into the games tools biz as well. Recursion!
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Dec 31, 2014 07:04
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Narzack posted:Does anyone have experience with writing text adventure/interactive fiction? I'm wondering what the best accepted practice is- right know, I'm writing most of the text in word, just to get the n arrative and ideas down. After I get that sorted, I plan to explore the different engines to start inputting all the information. Is this normal or backwards? Inform 7 in particular is very different from Inform 6, which won't mean anything to you if you're coming to this brand new, but you may want to check it out as it takes a very interesting approach to the whole problem, and is pretty interesting in its own right. As for your question, I don't think there's a single accepted best practice per se, but I don't think writing ideas down (in whatever you choose) to get them out of your head and into a moldable and probe-able shape is a bad idea. minidracula fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 07:00
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Narzack posted:It kinda looks like Quest is sort of a midway point between the programming heavy TADS and the design based Twine. Does that seem accurate? In terms of authoring environment, it seems fairly different from Twine in that it's more forms based, whereas my experience of Twine is writing text and marking it up. In terms of the default player experience, they seem more similar to each other than in the authoring experience, except Quest has a text entry field waiting for you as well which you can opt to use, and a parser behind that. Stock Twine is just clicking links to move things along. Twine is ultimately set of tools and/or a skin on authoring HTML (and JavaScript); Quest is too, ultimately, but has a few more intermediary levels, it seems. Forms-centric authoring, more of a focus on a notion of rooms, objects, and actions, somewhat different out of the box player experience (clicking links on objects in Quest will give you the actions you can perform on those objects, as the author previously defined them, in a drop-down list; presumably you could type in the same thing and it'd act the same way as well). On top of that, for authoring, Quest also has its ASL scripting language. I'm sure all of this is rendered as just HTML + JavaScript at the end of the day for deployment, especially since both are web-first. I didn't dig deep enough into ASL to see how it compares to e.g. TADS or Inform, etc. I suspect it's meant as something like that for Quest though; something closer to the text adventure domain than just forcing you to write JavaScript is. In Twine, customizations of how "Twine games" work is usually just that; done directly in JavaScript.
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Feb 20, 2021 06:36
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Out of curiosity: anyone here using DragonRuby for anything (e.g., development on a project, tinkering with ideas, tire-kicking DragonRuby itself, etc., etc.)?
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Jan 20, 2024 09:57
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