The Game Development Thread

[Slothy]

Definitely should. It's quite easy to use. In fact, it's quite possible to make a game without using their game maker language at all and simply create the events and actions you want, drag and drop the appropriate behaviour for objects, etc. It even has a built in sprite editor, and if I'm not mistaken can load midi files (but screw that, any music I make will be a bit higher quality than that unless I run into performance issues I couldn't solve any other way). Building simple games is surprisingly easy once you find the right tutorials and guides and whatnot to learn it. FYI: there are a lot of bad tutorials out there for beginners. I think I managed to find most of them. The one I linked to is the best I've found and genuinely helpful and well laid out and explained.

It would be nice having more people around here doing stuff with it to so we could all help each other out and stuff and things. I think I'm actually going to grab the full licensed version soon too. It unlocks all of the features, some of which I already want to use, and it's not too expensive actually.

Edit for Depression Moon: I thought about trying Unity for a while, but decided against it for now at least. Fact is, I know nothing about making 3D graphics, and that wouldn't be the only steep learning curve I'd have to climb. I've heard Unity is actually quite easy to use, but for someone with a limited background in programming just starting out, I'd rather wet my feet in something I can learn a bit more quickly. The fact that Unity apparently doesn't do actual 2D graphics very well was also a downside for me.

I'd like to progress towards using it someday though because I like a lot of the ideas they have and their business model is pretty damn awesome, but I'll save that for once I have a few games under my belt, understand programming a bit better, and can learn to make at least some basic 3D graphics.