boomity boom
Oct. 31st, 2006 03:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashOne of the things I've been doing these past few days - instead of actually working on any of the projects I'd like to play with - is playing a clone of Geometry Wars. Ponderings on how the basic game is interesting, but the complete abstraction kinda wears on me, plus some mentioning of my old game coding efforts in a recent post's comments, made me do something insane: I started to want to do some game-making.
I tried Torque Game Builder because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mharpold8 was raving about it recently. For me, well, it was incredibly sluggish to respond in the editor, and when it crashed three times before I'd even gotten past placing the background layers in the first tutorial, I abandoned it. Dunno if it's the Mac version or my system.
Then I went and asked for advice on Jeff Minter's forums, where a lot of hobbyist game coders hang out. Got reminded of Blitz, as well as SDL. And found out there's a Java games library that actually knows how to talk to the joystick.
I overcame the reflexive 'ugh!' from knowing Blitz started life as a dialect of BASIC. I now have a swarm of little wasp-girls on my screen, flittering all around under my left joystick, exploding out in all directions at a button press, and shooting little laser-beams into the air at a touch of the right stick. Yay for simple frameworks!
Though, honestly, I kinda miss 68000 assembly on the Amiga.
I might put something online tomorrow, for all two or three people reading this who have a Mac and a gamepad. First I probably need to generalize the gamepad a little, mine's kinda weird. Or I might switch to SDL and [choose language here]...
Addendum: Also I get to write comments referring to the "preferred intervespal distance". ♥
I tried Torque Game Builder because
mharpold8 was raving about it recently. For me, well, it was incredibly sluggish to respond in the editor, and when it crashed three times before I'd even gotten past placing the background layers in the first tutorial, I abandoned it. Dunno if it's the Mac version or my system.Then I went and asked for advice on Jeff Minter's forums, where a lot of hobbyist game coders hang out. Got reminded of Blitz, as well as SDL. And found out there's a Java games library that actually knows how to talk to the joystick.
I overcame the reflexive 'ugh!' from knowing Blitz started life as a dialect of BASIC. I now have a swarm of little wasp-girls on my screen, flittering all around under my left joystick, exploding out in all directions at a button press, and shooting little laser-beams into the air at a touch of the right stick. Yay for simple frameworks!
Though, honestly, I kinda miss 68000 assembly on the Amiga.
I might put something online tomorrow, for all two or three people reading this who have a Mac and a gamepad. First I probably need to generalize the gamepad a little, mine's kinda weird. Or I might switch to SDL and [choose language here]...
Addendum: Also I get to write comments referring to the "preferred intervespal distance". ♥
no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 01:20 pm (UTC)SDL is pretty nice I guess. It's not going to be nearly as simple as Blitz, and it is a little sluggish compared to, say, OpenGL or…DirectX, god forbid, but it's nice once you get the boilerplate code down. I wrote a sort of pong clone (sans actual scoring) a long time ago using it, but it has since gone missing.
I also recommend checking out Pygame if you know Python. A lot of people seem to think it's the best thing ever, and it uses the SDL libraries in a more friendly object-oriented way if you're into that sort of thing.
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Date: 2006-10-31 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 04:02 pm (UTC)Blitzmax is worrisomely lacking in () and {}. My fingers keep adding them in, and it bitches.
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Date: 2006-10-31 07:17 pm (UTC)