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Game Development: So You Want To Makes Games
devoir
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Have you ever felt the urge to create your own game?
Inflict your creative/design/coding/sound/graphics/writing genius on us all?
Many careers have been started by people creating their own little indy projects, using a whole variety of tools including, but not limited to, those below:
- The Games Factory 2 / Multimedia Fusion 2
- Flash
- Microsoft XNA
- NWN Toolset
- FPS Engine Mod Development Kits
- Adventure Game Studio
- Game Maker
- Irrlicht - A free, open source game engine with .NET bindings.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different ways you can develop your own game. Many different languages, platforms, engines, genres, etc are all available to the aspiring indy game developer. Especially with the advent of things like Steam, Stardock, Xbox Live Marketplace, WiiWare and the Playstation Network, smaller players are getting more and more opportunities to get their foot in the door and show what they can do to the world.
Aside from the technical aspect, I'm sure that almost every person who has played games as much as we do has had thoughts about what they would do in their own game. Game design is, by itself, awesome fun as you plot out how game mechanics will work, how the storyline will flow, etc, etc.
I'm personally thinking of getting back into XNA, teaching myself C# as I go and hopefully get to the stage where I can have a vertical slice of gameplay that is fun and entertaining enough that I can show other people.
Inflict your creative/design/coding/sound/graphics/writing genius on us all?
Many careers have been started by people creating their own little indy projects, using a whole variety of tools including, but not limited to, those below:
- The Games Factory 2 / Multimedia Fusion 2
- Flash
- Microsoft XNA
- NWN Toolset
- FPS Engine Mod Development Kits
- Adventure Game Studio
- Game Maker
- Irrlicht - A free, open source game engine with .NET bindings.
There are hundreds and hundreds of different ways you can develop your own game. Many different languages, platforms, engines, genres, etc are all available to the aspiring indy game developer. Especially with the advent of things like Steam, Stardock, Xbox Live Marketplace, WiiWare and the Playstation Network, smaller players are getting more and more opportunities to get their foot in the door and show what they can do to the world.
Aside from the technical aspect, I'm sure that almost every person who has played games as much as we do has had thoughts about what they would do in their own game. Game design is, by itself, awesome fun as you plot out how game mechanics will work, how the storyline will flow, etc, etc.
I'm personally thinking of getting back into XNA, teaching myself C# as I go and hopefully get to the stage where I can have a vertical slice of gameplay that is fun and entertaining enough that I can show other people.
devoir on
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As this is the technology forum, I'm hoping to get some discussion about the nuts and bolts of creating a game, especially as a hobby developer who doesn't have the luxury of any real kind of budget in money but a bit of spare time and technical skill.
Obviously a lot of the tools I've listed are great for prototyping and developing ideas, but maybe not for a commercially viable game on many of the digital distribution platforms I listed as well. So I'd love to see talk about actual engines, etc.
Basically, I'm trying to find an engine to work off of. Needs to be free(or the purchase of a game, if its modding a game). Its going to be 3d, singleplayer, and either FPS/TPS(Depending which is easier, etc). Flexible AI is a must, because there's no way I think I'll be able to code an AI myself. Code wise, it doesn't really matter, I have to learn one thing or another for this project. Looking for something relatively modern(so that I can push plenty of pretty polys, of course). I've been thinking about the source engine, but there are problems I am thinking of here:
Since there's no hope of decent voice acting, I want to set up text boxes like a traditional JRPG. Whether they pause the game or go as its playing, either can work. I also would like to have cutscene's that don't keep you in character(As far as I remember with Halflife 2, I never saw any cutscene's like that. You were always gordon).
Any suggestions?
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
There should be a way to have some sort of text overlay to display your dialogue, but getting cutscenes like those in Half Life 2 is going to be really difficult without voice acting.
If you're more focused on story telling, perhaps something like a NWN mod would be appropriate.
PSN: Lqmpley | Steam: TheOne(AndOnly)
VB classic? Did you get anywhere near decent performance? If so I salute you.
I dunno if this counts as sitewhoring but see for yourself.
It's a puzzle game. The instructions are on the site. I wrote them in highschool. The english is atrocious.
Another one I forgot to mention was Titan Quest and its expansion for which the developers released a whole bunch of internal tools for people to fiddle around with.
What are you writing it in? What is your goal for the engine?
Neverwinter Nights.
I have to say that the id Tech 5 stuff looks awesome, but it's probably the kind of thing that you really, really need a very talented bunch of people to generate results from.
I need to break out the Flash again, I made a couple of really basic games through that which will probably do okay with some documentation in a portfolio, though I would like to do something more polished. They were both university projects which had certain requirements (an educational version of Asteroids and a basic isometric tile-based game)
Hopefully I can get some decent art made so it won't look like ass.
Want to work up to a very basic top-down shooter by the time March rolls around.
Eh, it is better than any game I've written (well, any game that wasn't a mine sweeper clone). I guess performance is a moot point.
Not to mention there is a really helpful surrounding community.
I'm not entirely sure if I like the XACT too much. IMHO, it's kind of a pain really. I use BASS API for all my audio/voice needs. But then again BASS will most likely not work on the Xbox 360.
Oh, it's probably better in NWN2, I just have no actual knowledge about it. You'll probably be good with either.
What kind of progress have you made? What kind of stuff are you proud of, or found really neat? What are your plans?
I've seen some physics libraries being ported over to XNA so that they will work with the 360.
Is Python popular for Rogue-likes?
Much experience with Python outside of this project?
Rogue-likes I think are still largely considered a C++ and curses affair, but Python is easily ideal for rogue-like development, on account of you don't need blazing 60fps physics performance coupled with everything about the language that makes people like it.
This is also my first Python project, so I'm learning as I go. I did a review and reorganization of my project last night, and it's not as bad as I thought. I just got a little confused when I was first creating some modules, but on the whole any violations of good design practices are minor.
The biggest problem is finding some efficient way to handle inter-module communication. I have a half-assed controller object now that every "listener" can post events to, and the controller will re-post them to the modules that want to know about that type of event, but a single event ends up traversing a lot of switch-like if/elif trees just for a single map redraw, and all in all it's kind of a mess, since I'm not sure if I'm implementing an objective-C-like Action/Outlet controller system, or an event system, where I should be keeping a list of all the listeners, along with what types of events they want, and simply posting any event to all listeners based on that mask. (I think I'd really prefer the latter here, but I have no idea how to implement that.)
Although it's not really a game in it's greatest sense, I am very proud of learning how to work with Audio to create some neat visual effects. It's done in the game I titled Emerald Hunters.
For the first attempt game, I made the classic pong clone. Check it out here.
I have noticed that. I used the Farseer Physics with a couple simulations. It really helped with the learning curve that's for sure. There was also a particle engine that I found called Mercury Particle Engine. It's pretty nice, but after a while I figured out how to write my own sort of.
I still need to work on shader programming though.
What exactly are you referring to when you say game studio? Where are the groups of people you're talking about coming from? An indy, hobbyist environment?
its being done in C++ and its to help my mates make 2D strat games/RPGS so its kinda bespoke but I suppose if they ever wanted to change their plans would take much to convert seeing as its all blackboxed.
Sorry, I still don't quite get it. Do you mean integrating a team into a studio environment, or just applying studio organisation principles to an existing team, making it 'professional' as opposed to a hobby?
A Game Studio, as I see it, is an organized group of people working within a group of tools specific to the concept and production of games.
As for the AI that's already in there, you'd need to tell me more or less what you wanted it to do before I could tell you if it's flexible enough.
Ah. Not intending to be a jerk, but I thought it'd be common sense that having a group of people in an organised environment with the proper tools and direction would be better than being scattered and dealing with it in an ad-hoc fashion with whatever they could scrape together.
Unless you're trying to find some quantifiable way to measure the improvement that you see when running a game studio as opposed to a hobbyist outfit.
:P True. I'm simply trying to find a way to relate the dynamics that you get with game development teams with traditional software development teams. Traditional software development teams have a greater tendency in running into arguments over performance optimization even before most of the software has been written. I see games to be one of the very few instances where performance is actually a concern; not to mention visual appeal.
As silly as it sounds, traditional software, although so much simpler in development, somehow takes longer to make than a very very complex game.
Well, more than anything I plan to use this project as a learning tool for myself. But I do have an idea that I'd like to try to get done, even if its content light on one map :P Starting small and all that jazz.
As for the AI... Just the basic things. I mainly was talking about AI if I was going to work on a different engine, as I know the HL2 AI is pretty well done. I just basically want to be able to make new weapons, etc with a base that I can work off fairly well.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
I'm liking my interface for it less and less though, as it often loops back and causes state changes in the calling class (say when a bunch of messages get cued up, and we have what I call a "MESSAGE_QUEUE_LOCK") which is one level of recursion.
Warning: slightly complicated plea for help:
self.evManager.Post( MessageEvent("There is a wall in the way.") ) self.evManager.Post( MessageEvent("You hit your head on the wall.") ) self.evManager.Post( Event(MESSAGE_FLUSH) )Here, the flush event will make any message views (hey, never know when you might want more than one) start displaying all the messages they have cued up, and if it can't fit them all on one line, it puts up the "more" prompt, and sends out an event that causes my GameLogic class to change to a lock state (recursion ends here, as flow returns to my key press detector, which is never called) where all commands simply cause another flush event to be posted.
All in all, simply moving a single square results in way too many "events" traversing way too many conditional trees for my liking, and I wish someone could shed some light on how "real" games handle this sort of thing.