I’d rather wait until we’re all in (September).
@AbrarSyed you agree right?
Would you guys feel really disappointed, sad, betrayed, livid, etc. if I asked to defer this to next year?
Do you think this project will just never happen in that case?
Salaam fellow Maker bros,
Humblebundle has just released a Game-maker bundle.
From $1 you can pick up a copy of game maker with some games including source code.
Beat the average for a HTML5 module and more games/source code.
For upto $15 you can get the full pack including more games, source code and modules for making games on Android and IOS.
Get to it!
I saw that, but is it a good game development tool? The games all look…bad lol.
Sorry to drop the ball on this. A Day and a Night took up all my free time.
Wa’alikum as-salaam,
Thanks @Severok for sharing. I got RPG Maker for $1 like this a year ago or more.
I personally didn’t like Game Maker. I found it too hard to use (I kept thinking “I can code this faster myself …”). That was before they introduced Android. Feel free to give it a whirl if that’s your thing.
I would personally use it for prototyping and/or testing out game design ideas quickly (and roughly). If you have a comp-sci/engineering background, I think you’ll find coding much easier. YMMV
I might pick up the entry level package to take a look. If nothing more I want to take a look at the provided source code.
Also as an FYI for designing and organising your initial concept, I have started playing around with a new diagram program called yEd. It is free and easy for drawing up various flow diagrams. Just throw down some nodes, click and drag to link them together then the software will arrange them all for you in a neat and highly customisable way.
Looks awesome for those early design stages before you approach psuedo code.
Alrighty, I picked up the bundle and activated my licences.
Now I just have to download the 115MB installer, which will apparently take about 4 hours.
Looks like I can’t give my 1st impressions of the toolkit until tomorrow.
Doesnt look particularly good lol. Seems like they are all 2D games that are more in the realm of flash games from the early 2000s. lol.
@roketfiq if it makes you feel better, they created that game for a competition, on a fairly short timeframe (either 48 hours or 7 days).
lol well, okay thats not bad. Haha.
Sorry, I typed that comment in a rush.
Real answer: Game Maker is not for making triple-A games. Sure, you can do a lot with it; but it’s like anything in life: the more you put in, the more you get out of it.
IMO you should look at their target market: people who want to make, probably casual or semi-serious games, without learning a specific programming language. (You still learn programming concepts, like loops, variables, etc.)
So in that context, @Severok I don’t know if this is the right product for you. I think you will learn a lot though, no matter what you do with it.
GameMaker pro is $150. The iOS/Android modules are like $300 each. The HTML5 one is $200.
So for $15, you’re getting around $1k worth of retail software.
I’m brown. I don’t know if I’ll use it, but I’ll buy it just because it’s on discount. May Allah reward you for sharing @Severok, if we do come back to this game dev thing, maybe we can consider using GameMaker.
I’m still down for this dev project.
One thing I really need to work on professionally is developing for speed.
I tend to get obsessive about my designs and insist on getting things just right, so I need to get more experience in getting a working prototype together in as little time as possible and accepting design flaws where needed.
More specifically I need to learn to strike the balance between rapid development and quality.
InshaAllah I will revive this as soon as I finish my current project – maybe by the end of the year. If you want to get practice wtih PyGame/GameMaker, those are good choices.
I am playing around with gamemaker right now, learning how their scripting works.
I have had a little idea on the back burner for a top-down trading game set in space that I might play around with here.
Basically a little point and click system where you can direct your ship to different systems, buying and selling cargo to maximize profit. To increase complexity as the project goes, introduce ship upgrades, events, maybe basic space combat.
The game world I imagine involves a group of sectors orbiting a star, sectors at different altitudes orbit at different speeds so neighboring sectors periodically move in and out of alignment, so they player has to decide what trade routes offer the best prices and fuel efficiency to reach. Kind of like a Top-down elite meets Kerbal space program.
I started this project about half an hour ago.
I learned how to create a blank screen (a room)
create basic objects (A blank object I called “Star” and assigned a very basic sprite to, and another basic object “Zone” I made a simple ring sprite for)
I started playing around with scripting, writing a simple script to run when the ‘room’ opens to spawn a “Star” object at the centre of the screen and 5 rings of “zones” around the star in groups of 3,6,9,12 and 15 respectively.
Next step will be to have each of these rings rotate around the star at different rates (inner rings rotate faster) then add a mouse event to the objects so selecting them will later prompt the player ship to move to that location for trade.
2 Likes
Cool stuff!
My oververall first impressions of game-maker are fairly positive.
The tools are simple and easy to learn.
The scripting language is very basic but functional, only about as difficult as Python.
The coding is very object orientated, For non-coders you prototype objects, set events that they act on such as on collision or every step, every time that event occurs it runs a specified action you programmed have such as move object in this direction or execute a custom script.
Eg if I remade my play-around program in pygame (Gridbug), I would create a “Bug” object then give it the step event with the result ‘Move in random direction’ and a collision event for 'Splode. The start up script I write would simply create a set of bug objects around the map at random locations and they will control themselves using the behaviour I wrote on the object prototype.
it is very easy to create sprites, import media such as sound, music, graphics and apply them to different objects, background etc.
All the lower level engine stuff is taken care of leaving just the higher level scripting and game design for the user.
3 Likes
have you messed with godot?
I found Godot has a steep learning curve. I decided not to pursue it. In a few minutes, I couldn’t even get a basic sprite to display on-screen and run the actual game.