How do you make your games?

[dustinaux]

I've made a couple flash games, ported one to mobile, and had a job making games in Unity so I have some experience here.  Never used game maker myself, but it seems like a good tool for beginners.  I actually got started with RPG Maker, which has an event system that taught me the basics of logic and conditional branches that forms the core of programming, and from there went on to edit it's existing scripts here and there and then finally coded a flash game from scratch after years of that.  RPG Maker's a bit dated now I think so I'm not necessarily recommending it, just saying how I played around making stuff with it for years before actually seriously programming.

Used a bit of Unity at my old job for around 6 months or so, doing both 3D and 2D stuff, and it's a pretty great tool but I wasn't a fan of the 2D side of it.  Coming from flash game programming, it just felt like so much extra overhead to make 2D work with it since Unity essentially a 3D engine, plus it's 2D is still a fairly new and not quite as fleshed out as it's 3D features.

Currently I'm using HaxeFlixel for its great cross-platform capabilities.  You write code in Haxe (very similar to AS3) and you're able to compile it to desktop PC or Mac, a flash game, android, iOS, and a couple others.  Most of the targets converts the Haxe code into native C++ code when you compile if I understand it correctly, so performance is supposed to be better than if it's wrapped in some sort of package.

I'd recommend a tool like Game Maker if you're totally new to making games, but if you wanted to try code from scratch, HaxeFlixel isn't too hard to get started with.  It has a lot of it's own framework that I think most people use, but I ended up preferring to use Flash's own classes and display tree that I was familiar with which works totally fine.

Also regarding programming practices, I've found that basically every programmer has their way to write syntax that they think is "right," so just go with what you personally like.  For example I like to use inline ternary operators inline for simple booleans and do stuff like

Code: [Select]

if (gamePaused) return true; on one line where some programmers would go nuts at that and say the only "correct" way would be to have 4 lines of

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if (gamePaused)
{
    return true;
}
I think the convention of prefixing variables with types like "flMyFloat" may be left over from early programming when compilers and editors weren't as robust and it'd be harder to find errors, so I think it's a bit overkill myself, but if you like to use it go for it.  A lot of tiny stuff like that's just a matter of opinion so just go with what you like.

[PsylentKnight]

It seems like the general consensus is that Unity is pretty cumbersome for 2D games... which is pretty much what I decided after having programmed a pong clone. I feel like I could have done it much quicker in Gamemaker. Construct does seem like it would be fun to work with, but as ErekT said it can perform poorly. I hadn't heard of HaxeFlixel before, so thanks for the tip. Thank you all for your insights.

[lachrymose]

I prefer Unity3d myself.

They seem to be moving in the direction of supporting more sprite based games, plenty of free Unity packages that help you get on the right track for sprites as well.

[Probo]

what problems have you had with game maker, psylent? ive used it a fair bit, maybe i can help

[PsylentKnight]

When working on a platformer prototype, I was having an issue with the player hovering one pixel about the ground after having jumped. I used the exact same scripts/DnD stuff and sprites that a tutorial I was following on youtube used. I honestly didn't spend a ton of time on it, but none of the workarounds I could think of would work. For example, trying to compensate by coding the player to go down one pixel after landing would cause him to get stuck (although he wouldn't be visibly inside the ground tile). Don't worry about helping me though, I'll go back to it and try some more things eventually. Thanks.

[rikfuzz]

I've never used game maker, but similar software, and I always have the actual player object invisible and position the sprite object ontop of it, with whatever offset that makes sense.  Use the real player object for movement and collision detection (or sometimes other invisible aligned boxes for detections when multiple different checks are needed) and the sprite for animation only.

[Ellian]

It's working on an old version of Game Maker and most likely not working in GM:Studio, but this is a very, very good platformer engine and at the very least it's worth looking into for inspiration.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5790.0

[Probo]

@Psylent

there is a known bug with sprite flipping changing collision boxes, (using image_xscale to flip a sprite, to save you having a left and right sprite. not sure if it happens vertically with image_yscale) but theres a workaround. apart from that, theres no reason i know of that should be happening so its probably very fixable dude! just a code thing probably. but i wont try to help

[Carnivac]

What bug might that be?  Never encountered it myself but perhaps that may be because I use the recommended method of using a rectangular mask for collision detection rather than the object's visible sprite itself?  Who knows?

Anyways yeah I recommend Game Maker Studio.  Been using GM in it's various incarnations for almost 12 and half years now.  Pretty amazing how it's changed since the early days.  The room editor is still a piece of crap though but there are alternative external editors to that such as Tiled Importer GMARE (Game Maker Alternative Room Editor) and which can access the room data directly (a big change from old GM to GM:S was that the files aren't all saved into one big project file unless you choose to do it that way, it's nicer from a development viewpoint to have all the files there seperate on the hard drive in folders like GM:S does by default.  Think it called sandbox or something, I dunno). 

[Probo]

yeah i dont use precise masks for sprites either by and large, just rectangular/square. the glitch affects them.