Collecting Wishlists For A 2d Game Development System

[White Flame]

I can give you a good example for a professional 3d game engine, which is REALLY user friendly:
take a look at the trial version of unity3d (www.unity3d.com), if you have a mac (win version istn available yet)

Nope, no Mac here. The technical feature set does seem pretty stock, but it looks like a REALLY polished and well thought-out editing environment, and has the docs online to boot. I should ruthlessly stealUH I MEAN "draw inspiration" from their concepts. Stuff like automatically re-importing updated resources I already had on the list, but this will demonstrate some good concepts already in use.

The only thing that concerns me about "in situ" editing is if your levels need to be auto-generated, or change radically depending on runtime parameters. There's really no easy way to get away from procedural content in those cases, and in situ editors typically solve it by copy/pasting multiple slightly different levels to keep things directly editable. That, and most modern 3d games just have mostly fixed worlds anyway. (Just stating my goals, not saying that unity is limited in that way.)

 

[Pseudonym]

QUOTE
The others have already been incorporated if you read through the thread.


Sorry, I can't understand most of the technical stuff. I'm just learning to program.

and for the real point in this post...What, in concept will be the difference between the free one and the $20 one? features? or usability? are our idea's incorporated into both?

sorry if i missed anything

 

[White Flame]

and for the real point in this post...What, in concept will be the difference between the free one and the $20 one? features? or usability? are our idea's incorporated into both?

The commercial one would have more editors included, and probably support more engine features. I do want the free one to be fully capable of lots of games on its own, and recall that I'm not going to charge anything at all until I feel it's reached commercial quality.

I already have a lot of design sunk into this, since I am making this for my own use as well. So the benefit of this discussion is reinforcement of the directions to focus on that others hold important, filling in gaps I missed, and pointing me to other positive and negative examples.

 

[hessiess]

Is this going to be open source or just free? and will there be a Linux version.

 

[White Flame]

Is this going to be open source or just free? and will there be a Linux version.

The engine & dev environment will be "just free", game components for it will be open source. The development environment, including the interpreter, is cross-platform and should run anywhere (though it does take a lot of resources; not sure if it will run on the Pandora well). Minimally, the generated game is C source code relying on SDL+OpenGL[ES], which either the dev environment can compile up for you, or you can copy over & build on the target. It should get smarter as it progresses.

 

[Ethan]

Nope, no Mac here. The technical feature set does seem pretty stock, but it looks like a REALLY polished and well thought-out editing environment, and has the docs online to boot. I should ruthlessly stealUH I MEAN "draw inspiration" from their concepts. Stuff like automatically re-importing updated resources I already had on the list, but this will demonstrate some good concepts already in use.

The only thing that concerns me about "in situ" editing is if your levels need to be auto-generated, or change radically depending on runtime parameters. There's really no easy way to get away from procedural content in those cases, and in situ editors typically solve it by copy/pasting multiple slightly different levels to keep things directly editable. That, and most modern 3d games just have mostly fixed worlds anyway. (Just stating my goals, not saying that unity is limited in that way.)



Yea, it's a very good engine, and the way to go. you should absolutely go that "editor" way.
just inspire yourself and feel free to ask me anything about unity if questions come up.
Have a look at the scripting and the framework of the script reference, its very logical imo.

gabriel

 

[audovoice]

It is inevitable not to mention RPG-maker. One very useful thing is a default group of presets that give you the frame work of a game the way any RPGmaker has it set up each time you start a new project. Lets face it way over 90% of small games go nowhere. They way that application has it set up is to leave you with some workable stand ins for things like random encounters, level ups, skills, a party of characters, so that you can focus on other things until the game actually goes some where or is abandoned.

You want to have a program that can make a number of different but mainly 2d side scrolling fighting games and 2d side scrolling space shooters.

It would save people a lot of time and it is not a new concept.

also an auto parallax tool for panoramas that are certain percentages away from each other so that they move naturally in relation to each other and the speed of the group could easily be chosen. Naturally Some of the panorama slots could be left blank and additional layers could be fitted in and set to there own speed for things like trains or running rivers.

 

[White Flame]

It is inevitable not to mention RPG-maker. One very useful thing is a default group of presets that give you the frame work of a game the way any RPGmaker has it set up each time you start a new project. Lets face it way over 90% of small games go nowhere. They way that application has it set up is to leave you with some workable stand ins for things like random encounters, level ups, skills, a party of characters, so that you can focus on other things until the game actually goes some where or is abandoned.

You want to have a program that can make a number of different but mainly 2d side scrolling fighting games and 2d side scrolling space shooters.

It would save people a lot of time and it is not a new concept.
Yeah, RPG maker has come up a number of times, and I've used it in the past before quickly bumping up on its limits. My notion of having a library of genre- and feature-based modules to incorporate and change should give the user a good starting point.

Do you list only fighters & shooters just because they seem to be the most common projects people undertake? RPGs and their hybrids also cover a lot of pipe dream space in the amateur programming market. Puzzle & block games tend to enjoy a lot of commercial success, but you don't tend to see too many amateur projects targeting them.

And yeah, it's definitely not a new concept at all (Pinball Construction Set et al, I'm an old fart ), it's just that everything in this segment has always been based around either tight genre assumptions and inflexible behavior that always precludes making what you really want, or so low-level that you might as well do it in C with good libs.

re: Parallax

I have 2 different forms of parallax laid out in my design:

1. Simply declare a layer's motion as a multiplier of the "main" layer's motion
2. Layers have proper depth distance values, which would make depth-moving effects work properly.

A top-down display for the 2nd method might be handy, keeping in mind that there's 2 different ways of doing the actual graphics for parallax:

1. draw the bitmaps already at their intended depth
2. the bitmaps should be zoomed to go into the fore/back ground

Since this is running on top of OpenGL, throwing bitmaps in with Mode7-style effects would be easy to do, but I haven't thought of how the editor should work for that. Connecting a perspective "floor" between 2 parallax layers is the easiest, but is just a single-use feature.

 

[Mattz]

I have only ever used Game Maker (6), but it seemed to be as close as being able to make any sort of game as possible. Users can add resources, and create 'Objects' which can control these resources. Such as adding an animated sprite of a character walking, setting the play objects sprite to that animation, and using some basic code to control the animation speed depending on the speed of the object. If the player releases the arrow key, the character slows down and the animation slows down to stopping.

I made quite a few different styles of game with game maker, and it seemed to be very capable, allowing drag and drop programming, or adding a code box where the user had access to lower levels of the engine.
If you have not already, you should check out the free version and maybe download a few examples from their community, and you will see how versatile it is.

From reading the first post, it seems like you are wishing to create a suite of programs specified to different gameplay elements, and adding as many features as possible. I think this is a bad thing because it means that games may be too simple to create, and will lead to far too many 'generic' games (as is a problem with Game Maker, everyone releases their first basic game to the community).

 

[lootic]

I want it to be like you draw your map(like working in paint),
you draw unit animations and call the files for let say "walk" "attack" "idle" then you assign these animations to the controls like
walk=arrow keys
attack=z
idle= -

then for events I want it to be like this(very similar WC3 world map editors trigger editor):
conditions
"___" enters region "5"
"___" says "dhsua"

action
then do "open door alpha" else do "nothing"


I also want to be able to assign hurt and hitboxes their size and extra effects that can be changed like you make an effect like "fire" and the "fire" triggers like:

condition
"____" is hit by "fire"

action
start "fire____"
start timer "burn"

condition
timer "burn" expires

action
kill "____"

this will make it pretty quick to create and mod a game, requires some skill from the developer though but not anywhere near as demanding as programming



I know my explanation is somewhat unclear so if you have a question on how I meant then ask.

 

[White Flame]

lootic: Incidentally, the condition/action syntax you describe is exactly how the current code is written. Typical "expert systems" and "rules engines" from AI-speak are just globally-firing rules like that. There are a lot of niggling issues with that style, though, like a lack of good "else" semantics, situations where the firing order of rules matters, etc. It's harnessing the ease and power of declarative programming along with the ability to sanely add in new states & exceptions during development (say you wanted to add your character slipping on ice areas; you don't want to have to go back and rework all your rules to check for ice), direct game-related support for otherwise difficult issues, organizing the work with respect to the user's design documentation, and compiling it all to C that sets what I'm doing apart from the rest.

From reading the first post, it seems like you are wishing to create a suite of programs specified to different gameplay elements, and adding as many features as possible. I think this is a bad thing because it means that games may be too simple to create, and will lead to far too many 'generic' games (as is a problem with Game Maker, everyone releases their first basic game to the community).
It's not a suite of programs, it's a unified system that also has modifiable modules that you can mix in to support common features, including various genre specifics. I believe it's crucially important in software development (including games) to have runnable and maintainable code at all times to promote progress, testing and experimentation, while avoiding getting lost in details, unimplementable ideas, and the psychological barrier of having a creation that doesn't work. Many game systems will let you get up quickly, but still bog you down in details or put up artificial walls that you have to spend more detail-time trying to hack around instead of spent on real progress.

So being able to quickly come up with a generic playable starting point for your game will be there. Yes, many basic users would just take whatever runs and post it to the world at large, but those interested in creating a high-quality game should reap large benefits in their development cycle in being able to throw something in that works from the get-go, then modifying and adding to it to get to a polished state that they initially envisioned.

The problem of voluminous newbie output would be a challenge to mitigate at the website & community levels, and is not something that I'd want to affect quality developers' experiences in using the actual dev system.

 

[lootic]

lootic: Incidentally, the condition/action syntax you describe is exactly how the current code is written. Typical "expert systems" and "rules engines" from AI-speak are just globally-firing rules like that. There are a lot of niggling issues with that style, though, like a lack of good "else" semantics, situations where the firing order of rules matters, etc. It's harnessing the ease and power of declarative programming along with the ability to sanely add in new states & exceptions during development (say you wanted to add your character slipping on ice areas; you don't want to have to go back and rework all your rules to check for ice), direct game-related support for otherwise difficult issues, organizing the work with respect to the user's design documentation, and compiling it all to C that sets what I'm doing apart from the rest.

Is it, lol, To me its fully logical. XD

anyway for the terrain to give you certain attributes I think you should have like some kind label system so that the game knows wath kind of the terrain is. so you will only need one condition/action

condition
"____" on ice

action
set traction to "5"

tracion is something that should be preprogrammed also XD

 

[atomicthumbs]

I really hope that this gets off the ground. If it does, I plan to build my planned game on it.

And if not, well, I'll just have to knuckle down and learn Python.

Any progress?

 

[White Flame]

Nothing releasable yet. I'm developing it in tandem with another project that's built on a lot of the same technology. It's still a while away, I just wanted to get a sense for the sorts of directions people wanted before getting too far in.

 

[Esn]

An ideal editor for me would be able to recreate the mechanics behind a game such as "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters", in particular the interaction with aliens (multiple dialogue options that affect the future course of the game).

And to allow the possibility for using more than one "template" in a game. So for example, in a "space exploration" game a character could land on a planet and it would suddenly become a "platformer" for a while, until he gets off the planet again.

 

[ninjamonkey]

How about halo 2d, like a ds style halo game for the pandora. that why i'm look forward to this sort of gaming system. If you seen the halo ds thing on the internet (which oddly resembles goldeneye rouge agent ds), that would be cool to have on the pandora.

 

[PoisonedV]

My suggestion is to find the biggest flaws and complaints about gamemaker and multimedia fusion and implement those things better.

 

[Vorporeal]

How about halo 2d, like a ds style halo game for the pandora. that why i'm look forward to this sort of gaming system. If you seen the halo ds thing on the internet (which oddly resembles goldeneye rouge agent ds), that would be cool to have on the pandora.

Read please.

This isn't about someone making a 2D game. This is about someone making a game-creator that people would use to create 2D games. How about you stop asking other people to make games and start taking some initiative yourself? Seems like the much better approach to me.