Game Creation on a Whim

Begin Dream Sequence:

I'm sitting at my desk in a bad mood - maybe something at work or an argument with the wife - and I want to sublimate some of this emotion in a creative way.

I can write - load up Celtx or OpenOffice or even Notepad and just start typing. Or put together a blog post. Heck, maybe just grab a Post-It and start putting words down.

I can draw - there's Paint on the computer or Inkscape or I can grab one of my sketchpads and doodle to my heart's content.

I can pick up my guitar and, even without plugging it in, pick out some riffs or blast through some chords.

But the one thing I can't do - yet - is tinker with gamemaking, not with the same ease.

There are two threads to this dream.

One is the desire for a program that makes it truly easy to assemble non-specific games. Getting a blank canvas and going through a huge database of objects and animations and interactions and laying out how they interconnect, testing right from the engine, plugging in code changes that work by selecting object associations. In short, something that has a relatively short learning curve but allows the flexibility and creativity of other programs. A game-making instrument, if you will. Visual, easily-modifiable, instant-compile, fuzzy.

The other is the desire to have a way to make games in the moment. Hence the first desire. As I said, I want an instrument. I want to sit down at my computer after tripping on LSD and assemble a rough cut of the videogame equivalent of Purple Haze. Or a way to capture depression in interactive form. Or joy. Or ecstasy. Or righteous anger. A basic way to put together a game based upon emotion while still in the throes of that emotion, the way Stairway to Heaven was hashed out in one night and only tweaked come recording time.

Maybe there are certain people using certain programs able to prototype in a small amount of time. But I've yet to see a program that handles things organically, that treats a game like a succession of steadily-more-refined sketches or whittling away at a clay block.

Things like Spore will probably be the tech to push toward this program in my mind.

Someone will get it made someday.

Faster, please.

Try It, You'll Like It

If anyone has any familiarity with Gamemaker, then you may be happy to know that version 7.0 is out. Also, development has been taken over by YoYoGames - hopefully with the result that there will be faster dev time and more resources devoted to the community.

We're going to use Gamemaker in the Game Design class I'm attending, so I went ahead and bought the Professional version (it's only 20 bucks). The Pro version basically makes certain things much easier - including a built-in particle system.

The community thus far seems a little more engaged than the one for Blitz3d (largely because the B3ders seemed to move over to BlitzMax, the Mac dev software). Though the comparison isn't quite fair since these are two very different programs.

Gamemaker's strengths are in the top-down and side-scroller realm. 3-d is possible, but you'll have to program a lot of functionality yourself and are better off with Darkbasic or Torque. The learning curve is pretty small, though I can't really recommend the tutorials on Gamemaker's own site - they, to put it mildly, suck.

I would stick with the help file and the Game Maker Community messageboard.

I've also ordered two of the books on the market specifically geared toward Gamemaker: The Game Maker's Apprentice and Basic Game Design & Creation for Fun & Learning. I may put up evaluations when those arrive.

As a test I sketched out a rough block, scanned it in, did some editing in GIMP and then exported to .gif. After that it took only a few button presses to get my hand-drawn art into a room. I threw in a snowman as a player, gave him movement functionality and tested the game. Voila! Big ugly penciled blocks and a snowman. Pretty cool.

The hardest thing is scaling everything properly and selecting the borders so that the player surface doesn't look awkward. That and trying to properly animate anything when your experience is close to zero.

Still, it's a great introduction. Some of the games coming out are great throwbacks and it's a great opportunity to learn the entire game development process on a small scale. It also gives me a greater appreciation for the complexity of those old school games, especially when I consider that they didn't have access to a handy little tool like Gamemaker.

When I finish something I'll be sure to post it.

Found

In a post earlier this month I lamented the lack of decent low-price authoring software on the PC (as compared to Macs).

Corvus suggested I check out Celtx.

Oddly enough, I had already. There was a copy of the program sitting right in my Programs menu. An old copy. From last year. Sometimes I forget what I download.

I vaguely recall not being happy with the program.

But I have since revised that opinion. Many versions later this is easily one of the best editing programs for anything: novels, screenplays, poems, notes.

The best part is that it's free.

The coolest feature is the ability to upload your work as public or private. Public and you can get feedback from all the other people using the program. Private and, well, you can't. But regardless, uploading allows you to sync your files on any computer that has Celtx installed. This is completely awesome.

The developers listen to the community and seem to be eager to place new features but also selective in order to avoid feature creep. The program is stable and fast.

The only function I've found myself wanting is a way to strip formatting from a body of text. I do lots of cutting and pasting from gmail and it comes with a lot of stray bits. The only way I've found to avoid this is pasting to a separate Notepad file and then cutting and pasting from there, which is not convenient at all. It's possible that I just haven't discovered that option yet.

So thanks, Corvus, for reminding me about this program. I've already begun transferring a large bulk of my writing and started in on a second draft of my first novel.