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Anyone ever tried to make a game?

Started by Eight Taiwanese Teenagers, June 30, 2017, 10:52:57 AM

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Eight Taiwanese Teenagers

While at the pub last night the discussion came around to what we wanted to grow up to be when we were kids, and I remembered my dreams of making computer games. It made me think, what's stopping me from giving it a go now? Just for fun, you know.

I've come up with an idea for a simple 2d platformer that you could play on a phone. Inspired by Rainbow Islands, Super Meat Boy, and Jet Set Willy.

Where do I start?

AsparagusTrevor

Have a look into either Scirra Construct or Clickteam Fusion, they both let you make games as simple or complicated as you want without all that pesky programming stuff. Platformers are pretty simple to put together in both programs.

I used to regularly use Clickteam's older game-creation software (Klik & Play, Game Factory, Multimedia Fusion) many years ago.

Bazooka

RPG Maker Fes has just been released on the 3DS, I might pick that up at some point. I remember tinkering around with a game maker on PC about 20 or so years ago, was very basic back then of course.


Glebe

[tag]Atari leave thread and bury E.T. in landfill.[/tag]

Mass_Panic

I'm making a Super Metroid inspired game in Construct 2. I'm about 2 years (of sporadic development) into it. I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but I've learnt a lot of programming concepts and logical thinking/problem solving doing this, and have managed to hack together a pretty decent ripoff of a Super Metroid style engine. It has been great fun working out things like how the mini map would work, how rooms link together etc. Game dev is pretty much the most fun you can have on a computer, especially if you're a bit of a jack of all trades it can be immensely satisfying to see something start to come together. I would wholeheartedly recommend something like Construct 2 (not Construct 3 as it uses an obnoxious rental model and is also too immature at present) as it is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to let you grow quite a bit. To make anything half decent you'll still have to tackle proper programming concepts and will still bang your head against the wall a lot, but overall it's glorious.

Eight Taiwanese Teenagers

Quote from: EFB on June 30, 2017, 11:19:21 AM
These videos are from a steampunk-sonic style game I was working on a few years ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ausnsCNjL8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8xTr-Os0w

That looks great! What were you using to make it? Are you not working on it any more?

Bhazor

Click team fusion is arse. Straight up arse.

If you want a idiot proof no coding needed 2D game maker try Game Maker. Its very possible to make an atari era game in that using just drag and drop logic without typing a single of code. I went from zero knowledge to making my own Breakout clone in about an hour.

Like Fusion it's accessibility quickly becomes a limitation but unlike Fusion it's never hardcrashed my computer.

Gurke and Hare

I made a Countdown game for the Vic 20 when I was about 10. It possibly didn't have the same high graphical standards that today's youngsters expect, but it gave you vowels, consonants and numbers, and even did a 30 second countdown.

Phil_A

#9
As a child I longed to be able to make games, but as I didn't have the patience to sit down and learn how to do BASIC properly, so all my rubbish ideas never usually got past the "drawing characters in a notebook" stage, but I did spend a lot of time making sprites for games that would never exist in the STOS sprite maker.

More recently I did manage to create a short piece of Interactive Fiction using Inform 7, which uses an interpreter where you have to describe everything in the game via logical statements, e.g. "The kitchen is a room" "Legend Gary is in the kitchen", etc. My game(if you can call it that) was based on the old IF trope of turning arcade games into text adventures, in this case Tetris.

It was quite good fun, although it made me realise what a job of work being a solo gamesperson is, as you have to be designer, writer and programmer all rolled into one, which even for a small game can be quite taxing. I haven't attempted anything more ambitious yet, maybe one day.

Norton Canes

Made a few viral games, back in the days of Flash. Even won an award for one of them. Not explored any other game-making apps since Flash died away. 

Bazooka

I'm looking to make a game to rival Fifa, where you get to play as the linesman and you use a motion controlled flag.

Phil_A

I've also just remembered an idea I had that never got very far, which was a text adventure based on the Blue Jam monologue "Rothko." I think the main problem was it wouldn't be very interactive as you would just spend the whole thing doing what Rotkho tells you.

Twed

Quote from: Norton Canes on July 04, 2017, 12:12:55 PM
Made a few viral games, back in the days of Flash. Even won an award for one of them. Not explored any other game-making apps since Flash died away.
Which games/who were you? We probably crossed paths.

Dex Sawash

Quote from: Norton Canes on July 04, 2017, 12:12:55 PM
Made a few viral games, back in the days of Flash. Even won an award for one of them. Not explored any other game-making apps since Flash died away.

Did you make Sissy Fight?
I love you if you did.

TheWoodenSpoon

Made two shitty games, one in secondary school (with the wonders of Klik n Play), and one in college (using VB of all things).

Both were complete shit, so now I just stick to making silly mods for old games.

hewantstolurkatad

Has anyone used any systems like Twine for mapping out dialogue? I've an interface I want to design to integrate with a system like that for a narrative idea and I think I can do it in a way that would be reusable for others if I can have some other system deal with all that shite; is that something that can be done pretty easily with any of those or are they all very independent systems?

Ideally I'd be looking for something that would be an NPM package that just works from maybe even an exported json file of all the options and how they're related

Mister Six

A billion years ago I used to make games with a crude but surprisingly flexible game-making thing called ZZT. Had its own little community of sexually frustrated teens. Astonishingly some of them are still there.

Consignia

Ha, I made a Brookside game in ZZT back in the day. IIRC, the main character was Jimmy Corkhill, and you had to skip town to avoid the armed drug lords and the busies.

EDIT:

Blimey, I've mentioned it twice before and both times the text is nearly the same. I'm nothing if not consistent:

Quote from: Consignia on May 04, 2010, 08:31:07 PM
Back in the day I made a Brookside RPG in ZZT. It was about Jimmy Corchill and running from drug dealers.

Quote from: Consignia on July 16, 2015, 10:24:22 PM
I actually made a Brookside RPG in ZZT, the ASCII RPG system. I think I've mentioned it before, but it involved playing as Jimmy Corkhill and escaping the drug dealers and the bizzies.

newbridge

Is there an easy platform for making text-based, simulator style games these days? I used to mess around with Visual Basic long ago, but no idea what the equivalent today would be.

Mister Six

Quote from: Consignia on July 22, 2017, 09:33:04 PM
Ha, I made a Brookside game in ZZT back in the day. IIRC, the main character was Jimmy Corkhill, and you had to skip town to avoid the armed drug lords and the busies.

Brilliant. Did you upload it to AOL back in the day? I might have played it.

Consignia

Sadly, probably not. I can't remember how I got into ZZT, but it must have been mid to late 90's and I think it was in Geocities space. And I probably didn't have the nous at the time to create a website, or upload anything to a community.

garbed_attic

I spent a fair chunk of my youth messing around with Klik n' Play and went back to it some years ago now when I discovered Glorious Trainwrecks.com

It's a fun little community, but compatibility (and - erm - aesthetic) issues mean that most games on there won't be played outside of the little circle, so you have to be okay with that.

That said, for what it's worth, here is my games page:
https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/games/*/Sprocket

I've posted about my love for Stephen (Increpare) Lavelle previously here, but I didn't really touch upon the fact that as well as making hundreds of fascinating games, he occasionally produces little pieces of game development software. I'm very fond of Klikgame because using it reminds me of my attempts to make games in PowerPoint back in secondary school. Puzzlescript is a far more sophisticated bit of kit in which to make abstract/ very pixellated puzzle games.

Here's two 5 mins micro games I made in Klikgame:

'Buckethead'
http://www.flickgame.org/play.html?p=4efcca742e1ee21e74c0

'Quaker Meeting Simulator'
http://www.flickgame.org/play.html?p=4b658b4f1f4eb2af98c0

Back in the day I tried to learn how to code in Inform, but now Twine has such dominance in the IF community, I don't know if I'd have the patience to pick it up again.

Twine allows HTML and css, but it is hard to make something truly "game like" with it... or rather, a lot of Twine games don't implement variables and so are - in essence - as static as a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

However, I'm a big believer that just reading a book in a different order substantially alters one's reading experience!

So, last year I made Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe adventure, which features all but about 3 of Poe's stories. It is really big. Probably too big really. It also gets more sophisticated the further you get into it as the more I wrote the more ambitious I got with implementing variables and objects and random events. Seriously, by the time you get to the last quarter of the game there are even some actual puzzles!

It's basically split into two main routes. With one route you try to escape a mansion; in the other route you try to orient yourself on a desert island. The mansion route mostly uses hypertext effects (slanting text! disappearing words! sound effects!) while the island route is a little more puzzley (objects you can carry! a maze! ascii art!)

But I think most people who played it died right near the start and gave up. I forgot that the vast majority of kids used to chat when playing Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

Anyway, here's the link to 'Evermore':
https://adamwhybray.itch.io/evermore-a-choose-your-own-edgar-allan-poe-adventure

EFB

Quote from: Eight Taiwanese Teenagers on July 02, 2017, 02:15:01 PM
That looks great! What were you using to make it? Are you not working on it any more?

I used a few java game libraries, and the box2d physics engine. I had to stop working on it when I needed to find a new job, and never got back into it.

Johnny Textface

I recently did a load of music and fx for someone trying to make a game. He has since failed to make the game.

Norton Canes

Quote from: Dex Sawash on July 04, 2017, 07:21:39 PM
Did you make Sissy Fight?
I love you if you did

No. I made this...

"Sexual health professionals in North Yorkshire and York are this week celebrating after their viral game 'Fanny and Jonny's Big Night Out' won gold at the Association of Healthcare Communicators awards held in Birmingham on Tuesday"

Beat that, you shits.

Rev

Unity remains the easiest thing to use that isn't just a drag-and-drop thing, doesn't it?  Clear one Sunday afternoon to learn a bit of C# or Javascript and you're away, you only really need to investigate things as you have the ideas that require them.

Bhazor

I actually think Unreal has really come on in usability recently. It comes with a bunch of basically half finished games with fully rigged human characters and ready made scripts for third person cameras and all that stuff.

The documentation is also kept a lot better. Unity is riddled with outdated instructions in all its tutorials and really arbitrary changes from one version to the next. Things like ticking a box by default when for three years it was unticked by default. Unreal is made by a much larger team with a more professional userbase and it feels much more curated as a result.

I know precisely zero point dick about coding though so I honestly can't say whether Unreal's C+ is better or easier than Unity's C#.

MojoJojo

C++ definitely harder/more complicated than C#.

Twed

It's also a very stupid language built for making mistakes in. It's dangerous and should be phased out.

This always results in somebody coming along to point out that they're the one special person in the world who can write perfect C++, but that's only because their software doesn't go through the ropes.

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-programmer.html