Some of us here are paid money to make games. Some of us used to be paid money to make games. Others went to school for it. Probably most of us just wish we could.
No matter your background, an unavoidable truth is that game making is the easiest it's been ever and it gets easier all the time. You can't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting some new fangled game engine that is begging people to use it. The hot thing right now is scripting based game engines that export to anything with a battery in it, like Unity.
Personally I hate shit like that, but I guess I understand it.
What kind of game making are you into?
Over the past two years I've been contracted to make three or four mobile games in LUA, which is a hideous language for mutants and degenerates. From there I started exploring PC games with XNA, I made a couple of good demos but now XNA is pretty much dead so yeah. Now I'm breaking out my very rusty C++ abilities and digging in with angel-engine, which is about the best goddamn thing ever for people with 2D experience who aren't great at C++.
Basically it's a collection of a lot of independent C++ libs that all do one thing very well. Physics, AI, UI, blah blah blah... all tied together with the most basic elements of building a 2D game... scenes, actors, bounding boxes, sprites, render loop, and the like. The best part is it all comes right out of the box with it, so there's almost no dependency management. Download and start building. Builds to Mac, PC, Linux, and in theory: iPhone. This removes all of my excuses for not building.
I had to beat myself into submission with finally choosing C++ over Python or something similar. The basic evidence suggests to me that C++ simply continues to receive active support from the community, whereas shit like Pygame seems dated and stagnant, and in some cases even minimally supported. (how many additional C libraries do you need to bind to Python before the point of using Python loses all meaning???)
I like 2D games. Which is another way of saying I don't have the patience or the money to make 3D games. 2D artists are cheap, 2D dynamics programming is easy, and 2D or at least 2D inspired games have made a real come back over the past couple of years.
I've been keen to build my own Diablo clone for years, and after a couple of stalled attempts with XNA, I am saddling up for the New Year to try and get something playable built.
What are you building, what have you built?
What do you want to build? What is your excuse for reading this thread instead of doing it?
Question plaguing me today: what's a smart way to handle tile collision maps as opposed to just tile maps themselves. For example, in an SNES zelda game, the tiles may be 32x32, but each individual tile has a subsectioned collision map with 8x8 resolution. What's a smart way to archive that data and coordinate it with your tileset data, when popular tile editors don't support such a feature?
No matter your background, an unavoidable truth is that game making is the easiest it's been ever and it gets easier all the time. You can't swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting some new fangled game engine that is begging people to use it. The hot thing right now is scripting based game engines that export to anything with a battery in it, like Unity.
Personally I hate shit like that, but I guess I understand it.
What kind of game making are you into?
Over the past two years I've been contracted to make three or four mobile games in LUA, which is a hideous language for mutants and degenerates. From there I started exploring PC games with XNA, I made a couple of good demos but now XNA is pretty much dead so yeah. Now I'm breaking out my very rusty C++ abilities and digging in with angel-engine, which is about the best goddamn thing ever for people with 2D experience who aren't great at C++.
Basically it's a collection of a lot of independent C++ libs that all do one thing very well. Physics, AI, UI, blah blah blah... all tied together with the most basic elements of building a 2D game... scenes, actors, bounding boxes, sprites, render loop, and the like. The best part is it all comes right out of the box with it, so there's almost no dependency management. Download and start building. Builds to Mac, PC, Linux, and in theory: iPhone. This removes all of my excuses for not building.
I had to beat myself into submission with finally choosing C++ over Python or something similar. The basic evidence suggests to me that C++ simply continues to receive active support from the community, whereas shit like Pygame seems dated and stagnant, and in some cases even minimally supported. (how many additional C libraries do you need to bind to Python before the point of using Python loses all meaning???)
I like 2D games. Which is another way of saying I don't have the patience or the money to make 3D games. 2D artists are cheap, 2D dynamics programming is easy, and 2D or at least 2D inspired games have made a real come back over the past couple of years.
I've been keen to build my own Diablo clone for years, and after a couple of stalled attempts with XNA, I am saddling up for the New Year to try and get something playable built.
What are you building, what have you built?
What do you want to build? What is your excuse for reading this thread instead of doing it?
Question plaguing me today: what's a smart way to handle tile collision maps as opposed to just tile maps themselves. For example, in an SNES zelda game, the tiles may be 32x32, but each individual tile has a subsectioned collision map with 8x8 resolution. What's a smart way to archive that data and coordinate it with your tileset data, when popular tile editors don't support such a feature?
