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Let's [Game Design/Development]
UnbrokenEva
HIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered User regular
HIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered User regular
Hey you! Over there, playing your games, dreaming about games. Did you know that you can make games, right in the comfort of your own home? It's true!
There are even free* tools to help you do it!
Maybe you want to start slow, maybe something 2D, maybe something that doesn't require mucking about with meshes and textures and stuff? How about something used to make one of the best games of 2013 (Gunpoint) that also happens to be the focus of a new tutorial series for beginners from Tom Francis, the creator of one of the best games of 2013 (also Gunpoint)
GameMaker Studio has also been used to make Hotline Miami, Nidhogg, Spelunky, and of course, Cook, Serve, Delicious! It is super flexible, fairly easy to learn, and also free (though the free version can only be used to make executable files, you need to buy the Pro version for $99 to be able to export to HTML5/Android/iOS/Mac/etc)
Tom Francis' tutorials start here:
http://youtu.be/DN6dZWXUEzA
Maybe you want to make a 3D game with lasers and pirates and whatever? That's probably a bit ambitious to start, but you can damn well try!
Unity is a free 3D game engine with a bunch of available tutorials that can easily compile games that will work on basically anything, including in-browser. Unity is pretty great, but does require some programming knowledge up front and can be a bit much for first timers.
This is a dumb little thing I made in Unity a while back. WASD to move, click to fire, Q to mark one of the boxes as a target (there's no feedback to show it's marked, just trust me), hold E to make the projectiles seek the targeted box.
It also has its own asset store so if you are butts at art (like me) and have some extra cash (unlike me) you can buy all sorts of models, textures, animations, music, whatever all ready to import into your game.
Maybe you don't want graphics at all, maybe you just want to tell an interactive story, like a choose your own adventure book-game-thing?
Still not sure what to do, or none of those options really got your attention? Do you have more questions, or want suggestions on how to create your own game art, resources on game design, tips on distributing your finished masterpiece?
Do you want to learn all of this in the form of a Twine (see above) game, and in doing so see my entire OP up to this point put to shame by something much cleaner and more comprehensive? (seriously I was kind of tempted to just link this and move on but that felt lazy)
Check out the Sorting Hat courtesy of one Zoe Quinn
so lets make some games SE++
let's make some magic
There are even free* tools to help you do it!
Maybe you want to start slow, maybe something 2D, maybe something that doesn't require mucking about with meshes and textures and stuff? How about something used to make one of the best games of 2013 (Gunpoint) that also happens to be the focus of a new tutorial series for beginners from Tom Francis, the creator of one of the best games of 2013 (also Gunpoint)
GameMaker Studio has also been used to make Hotline Miami, Nidhogg, Spelunky, and of course, Cook, Serve, Delicious! It is super flexible, fairly easy to learn, and also free (though the free version can only be used to make executable files, you need to buy the Pro version for $99 to be able to export to HTML5/Android/iOS/Mac/etc)
also you should probably note in the OP that $99 for Game Maker only lets you export to Mac as well and TEST on Android. Exporting to any mobile platform costs $299.99 per platform.
Tom Francis' tutorials start here:
http://youtu.be/DN6dZWXUEzAMaybe you want to make a 3D game with lasers and pirates and whatever? That's probably a bit ambitious to start, but you can damn well try!
Unity is a free 3D game engine with a bunch of available tutorials that can easily compile games that will work on basically anything, including in-browser. Unity is pretty great, but does require some programming knowledge up front and can be a bit much for first timers.
This is a dumb little thing I made in Unity a while back. WASD to move, click to fire, Q to mark one of the boxes as a target (there's no feedback to show it's marked, just trust me), hold E to make the projectiles seek the targeted box.
It also has its own asset store so if you are butts at art (like me) and have some extra cash (unlike me) you can buy all sorts of models, textures, animations, music, whatever all ready to import into your game.
Maybe you don't want graphics at all, maybe you just want to tell an interactive story, like a choose your own adventure book-game-thing?
Still not sure what to do, or none of those options really got your attention? Do you have more questions, or want suggestions on how to create your own game art, resources on game design, tips on distributing your finished masterpiece?
Do you want to learn all of this in the form of a Twine (see above) game, and in doing so see my entire OP up to this point put to shame by something much cleaner and more comprehensive? (seriously I was kind of tempted to just link this and move on but that felt lazy)
Check out the Sorting Hat courtesy of one Zoe Quinn
so lets make some games SE++
let's make some magic
UnbrokenEva on
+3
Posts
and my brain went "wait that's how easy it would be to give the bullets special behaviour!?" and off it ran
also I'm looking forward to goofing around with it instead of Unity because it is a hell of a lot easier to make shitty sprites for prototyping a 2D game than it is to make shitty meshes and textures for prototyping a 3D game. Heck, it's easier than importing and using someone else's shitty meshes and textures.
I never figured out how to spawn enemies, keep track of them, and delete everything cleanly. Either Flash is horrific for that or I found no resources that really explained how that stuff properly works.
I haven't done the 3rd part of Francis' GameMaker tutorial yet but based on the first two and the description of the third you'll be pretty much there in an hour and a bit, no trigonometry needed.
Imagine goty 420 blaze it but for mobas
I understand maybe a third of that second sentence
I use SDL2 for basic operating system stuff (input, output, files) and its 2D renderer
Awesomium for GUI
and everything else is original
AI, mapping, data systems, combat, and a dynamic lighting engine that supports blending and layering... and eventually ray tracing.
Still a long road ahead, but the experience so far has been great
I recently switched my development environment back to Windows, because Visual Studio is just plain better than Xcode for C++
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Oh I've watched the videos already, it is super easy to change the angle of sprites in Game Maker because it's a program for making games somewhat easily
Where Flash attempts(?) to be a proper programming language with Radians as a unit of angular measurement
Well, that loo--AAAH!
So, are there any good books on game design that aren't four or five times the price of normal Kindle books?
That being said, the only semi-complete project I've done was in Unity. Itch.io is PRETTY GREAT for getting your shit on the net on no budget.
Goty 420 blaze it is a amazing parody of first person shooter culture
So imagine a Moba that is just as shitty as possible and is needlessly hostile to new players
It's something I would consider if I had a) more practise than I do now, b) an artist to work with, and c) an idea that suited it.
For fooling around, prototyping ideas, and knocking the rust off my programmerbrain? Nope.
So like,
most of them?
Back when I was in school I made a tank game mostly from scratch in C++ and a two player LAN game of Go in Java, but my programming skills are beyond rusty at this point.
It's not 19 bucks a month
It's 19 bucks, and then for that month you can download Unreal. Once the month is over you don't lose the engine or anything. If you want updates, you pay for another month and download them, or don't and then use the version you have!
That makes sense. It also makes sense why they wouldn't mention that on their site.
Still, I'm looking to keep things 2D for now, and while I assume that's possible in UE4 like it is in Unity, it'd still be several layers of complexity more than I need. Something to keep in mind for when I am ready to goof around with 3D again though, I'd totally spend $19 once to see how it compares to Unity.
So Dota2?
I haven't played with the 2d stuff in UE4 yet, though it looks like it'd spit something out that looks like Shadow Complex. Which I am all about. You should definitely give it a spin, if only for the Blueprint system (which is absolutely amazing).
and then they did, and now my boner is for Unreal. Unity's still GREAT, but it's ten times easier to make something that looks ten times better in UE4.
we were previously working on a platformer w/ gamemaker studio pro that we had the good fortune to show off a couple pax easts ago but our programmer fell off the face of the earth so we switched to tabletop
Kind of gave up after that, mostly because I am shit at coming up with ideas.
I agree with this, the only thing about Unity that's still pretty damn nice is that UE4 requires decent hardware whereas Unity 4.6 could probably run on a Toaster if you duct-taped some RAM to the side.
Now I'm doing a lot of work in Unity.
I'm sure we can rope flappiness into the theme, whatever it is
I'm close, this might be fun.
noted, thanks!
It was the Doom Engine the book told you how to make levels design you own graphics and so on.
I remember the person who bought it turned doom into a bizarre dating game.
I have the RPG maker with some dlcs like the LUA engine.
I goof off a lot in it and make some broken to shitty games. I really need to make a clear list of what would neat in a game instead of changing my mind and ruining it.
But right now I'm working on project in Unity with a few friends of mine, and we're hoping to make something that is at least decent enough to throw onto the internet for free at some point!
Since I'm on my summer break from University at the moment (and have been since november) I've been working on it roughly full-time (around my actual part-time job) since I got back home from GCAP and PAX Australia last year. Hanging out with a bunch of indie devs had a huge effect into galvanising me into pouring far more effort into it than I was previously (regardless of my university work load), so I've been feeling pretty good on at least that front since then!
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
If you have any decent programming knowledge it really gets all the bullshit out of your way and let's you code.
I had a networked, fully functioning 4 player pong clone (paddles on each side of the screen) up and running in about 3 hours. It was dumb fun.
Uh-oh I accidentally deleted my signature. Uh-oh!!
Uh-oh I accidentally deleted my signature. Uh-oh!!