making games

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Bigdog
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making games

Post by Bigdog (?) » Tue Nov 05, 2019 10:26 pm

anyone here make games in e.g. unity or whatnot? (I'm not a big snob about engines, as long as it's free)

I've been trying to dip my toes in the waters of game design but anywhere I turn disappears down a fucking rabbit hole of bad tutorials and the expectations that you'll install endless plugins just to get basic functionality in your editor or w/e

actually my apologies, calling these travesties a "rabbit hole" is unfair to actual rabbits, most of whom are probably very sensible in the design and construction of their burrows

Perpetual Motion
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Re: making games

Post by Perpetual Motion (?) » Tue Nov 05, 2019 10:48 pm

I've toyed with Unity a bit, but I'm junk at 3D design things and Unity's 2D suite isn't really to my liking. I'm most experienced with GameMaker Studio and RPG Maker MV, but unfortunately those aren't free.

A lot of what environments/engines you want to work with really depends on what type of game you want to make, and what coding languages you're comfortable learning/working with, if any. GameMaker, for example, uses its own markup language, but it's extremely similar to javascript such that any experience there is immediately transferable, while Unity can use either javascript or C#, depending on your preferences. A lot of modern work environments have a decent amount of presets and features such that you can get by with minimal coding by just dragging and dropping stuff or just copying freely available scripts/plugins, but I find that you really need to code at least a little bit if you want to get any sort of unique experience out of what you're making.

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Re: making games

Post by Perrydotto (?) » Wed Nov 06, 2019 3:38 am

Maybe stuff like http://www.stencyl.com/or https://www.scirra.com/construct2 ? Both have paid versions, but offer free versions that can do most things.

If you don't mind a more basic/prototyping approach to start with, Twine is really neat too: https://twinery.org/
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Re: making games

Post by Bigdog (?) » Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:58 pm

Thank you for these replies.
Perpetual Motion wrote:
Tue Nov 05, 2019 10:48 pm
A lot of modern work environments have a decent amount of presets and features such that you can get by with minimal coding by just dragging and dropping stuff or just copying freely available scripts/plugins, but I find that you really need to code at least a little bit if you want to get any sort of unique experience out of what you're making.
The wall I'm running into with Unity so far is that even the bolded part is completely opaque to me, or at the very least I haven't found any tutorial or other learning resource that can lay it out in a way that doesn't run into roadblocks.
Perrydotto wrote:
Wed Nov 06, 2019 3:38 am
Maybe stuff like http://www.stencyl.com/or https://www.scirra.com/construct2 ? Both have paid versions, but offer free versions that can do most things.

If you don't mind a more basic/prototyping approach to start with, Twine is really neat too: https://twinery.org/
Thank you! I've actually fucked around in Twine before and I agree it's great for interactive novel type stuff, but that wasn't 100% what I was looking for here. I'll look at the other two though, for sure.

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Re: making games

Post by Perpetual Motion (?) » Wed Nov 06, 2019 11:12 pm

Bigdog wrote:
Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:58 pm
The wall I'm running into with Unity so far is that even the bolded part is completely opaque to me, or at the very least I haven't found any tutorial or other learning resource that can lay it out in a way that doesn't run into roadblocks.
Yeah, Unity is rough like that. I'm afraid I can't offer much direct advice for it, though, because I'm so far out of practice with it that most of my troubleshooting knowledge has worn away. Best I can suggest is to not really mess with comprehensive tutorials beyond the "this is how you make a basic controllable character on a flat plane" stage. Take what you learned from the ultra simple and try and do different things with it. If you want to do something you have no idea how to do, google that problem specifically. People are always asking about specific things, and instructions on how to do a single thing are way easier to suss out and remember than a tutorial covering a bunch of things.

Of course, none of this helps in figuring out the god damned UI in Unity's work environment, and I don't have any advice there beyond "just try and work it out." Sorry.

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Re: making games

Post by Perrydotto (?) » Thu Nov 07, 2019 2:08 am

For me Unity became vastly more usable with PlayMaker, but that is indeed a paid plugin, and the Humble Bundle it was in for cheap just ended. :modesty:
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Re: making games

Post by Bigdog (?) » Thu Nov 07, 2019 5:20 pm

I actually had Playmaker from that very bundle, which was what got me to try making a thing in Unity in the first place :v:

What tutorials helped you people understand any of this shit? Because I'm sure not seeing them.

Bigdog
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Re: making games

Post by Bigdog (?) » Thu Nov 07, 2019 5:23 pm

Like I can't even find anything like the "make a basic controllable character on a flat plane" tutorial that PM alluded to, at least not that isn't so old that it hasn't been hopelessly broken by new versions

by "so old" I mean "older than like a week" because apparently breaking everything with updates is the only way that software engineers can achieve sexual climax

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Re: making games

Post by Gloomy Rube (?) » Thu Nov 07, 2019 5:26 pm

Yeah my main issue with Unity has been the same, a complete lack of really comprehensive tutorials, to the point where I've heard that the best way to learn unity is to find a unity dev and get them to teach you. :v:
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Re: making games

Post by Bigdog (?) » Sun Nov 10, 2019 2:26 am

update: i've been fucking around with Stencyl and while I can't yet say if I'll be able to figure out how to make my own games, the tutorials are about 10000000000000000000x better than anything I found for Unity

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