I was just wondering what the consensus is hear on software for pc's such as The 3d Gamemaker and others? Complete shit?
3D Gamemaker http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2126 Looks like limitation of Doom type of flat level FPS. The 2d Game Maker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Maker Looks similar to a very old Gamemaker called Klik n Play, anyone try that one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klik I think the limitations are similar to 16 bit Shumps, RPGs and Platformers. I made a game years ago with the help of Klik n Play, Inspired by a couple very old Arcade games: BLASTO and SPACEWARS. Maybe a little of Atari 2600 COMBAT Tank level too. Here is the link with more info and the free game: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=278767#p278767
Game Maker is pretty flexible. I know that some dev houses have said they used it for fast prototyping at the earliest stages of development. Presumably only for 2D games, though.
Try out 3D Gamestudio, everything I ever learnt about programming and game development started with 3DGS. There are plenty of examples, a half decent book and some good active communities that can help start you off. You can do quite alot without having to jump into too much code.
Personally I've always seen GDK type software as a baby step into game programming. While serious developers will usually create their own engine from scratch and then use it and bend it and modify it for all their projects, present and future (see Rare), a lot of indie developers like to start easy with a prewritten generic engine and add in their own customizatoins ala GameMaker. It really depends on your level of expertice with programming and game development in general. If you know pretty well how games work already, I suggest writing a OpenGL/PortAudio based engine as those are the most portable Video/Audio libraries around, and in a way they mimic the behaviour of most SDK's used in console gaming (see libGX, etc...). Also, for input, windowing, menus, etc.., check out either GLUT or GLFW, both of which are very portable. You see, the most important thing in a PC game is portability as portability = more customers. In the console arena, portability is a biggie too if you are a third party developer, but if you are first party, or you only work with one system or family of systems, knowing all the tricks of the system you work with is best, and it doesn't matter if your code is portable or not, so if you really do have only one exact piece of hardware in mind, go all out on console specific optimisations and exploitation of hardware limitations. (For example, since the Sega Saturn was quad based, folding a quad resulted in a perfect curve being formed due to texturing or colorizing as the lines which went across a poly would move relative to the fold, creating one of these http://www.ratemydrawings.com/tutorials/drawing/109-Straight_lines_make_a_curve.html )
GameMaker 2D is ok. The 3D one is rubbish... Best bet, is to use Unity. Learn Javascript or C. Unity is fairly easy and powerful...
I would say go with.... Unity - Not sure? Think its free with limited features. UDK - Free Source SDK - Just recently made free Those gamemakers all seemed pretty rubbish when I messed with him. They have potential, but only if you get your shit together.
I used to use multimedia fusion 1.5 and 2.0 quite a bit (from Clickteam, who used to make Klik and Play back in 1996 ;p). They're pretty darn good, make flash files, java files, hardware accellerated EXEs, screensavers and online game applets. It can be expanded in C++ too.
Of course but someone else pointed out UDK being free as well but you need to purchase the licensing if you wish to sell your creation. Its the same for mostly every engine. I was under the impression this was just a homebrew want rather than a business venture. BTW, Love your username.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Commercial_video_games_with_freely_available_source_code There are even more than on that list
