Just wanted to reiterate how cool this is!
Dunno if this is a good place to post this, but I dug up an old John Romero program from a 1984 issue of inCider magazine. He wrote it when he was 16. The whole thing is half a page of “Applesoft” (is that the same as Apple BASIC?) and half a page of machine language.
Haha. That’s awesome! I like the detail, different shirts, etc.
I’m still working on my idea, but it’s been mainly stuff like setting up an scene class structure for transitioning through the game, etc. That’s mostly complete now, so next up I’ll work on the movement grid, terminal, and airplane layouts. Hope it won’t be too long before I have something more visual to show.
I was a java programmer and active in the mud scene in the early 90s, but got out of the business when the dot com bust happened. If I was interested in making a turn based strategy game, which of the current development platforms would be reasonable places to start? I knew the coding side of things, at least 20 years ago, but my graphical talents are non-existent.
I guess it depends on your current coding skills. If you’re looking to do something in 2D and need to brush up on learning a language, I’d have a look at love2d. It’s very easy to get going in Lua. Likewise, I believe that cocos2d-x (which has C++ as a primary focus) also has JavaScript and Lua bindings, so you can write games in either of those languages. Or in C++, of course. If you think it will be easiest to jump back into Java, then have a look at libgdx, or, if you need a more gentle way to get started, check out Processing, which is a superset of Java that is very easy to get started with and there are tons of good tutorials online. The downside there is that it is not specifically a game engine, so will lack some of the constructs you might expect in a game engine. Processing is a great place to go to remember how to program, though. There’s always GameMaker, for getting started, but it’s not free. Unity3D is free for hobby projects and C# is similar to Java. Try as I might, I can’t stop getting confused with the Unity UI.
I’ve started a few little game projects, sometimes getting pretty far along. But the one thing I always wish that the different tools had was decent objects and functions for easily making user interface elements. A lot of the game ideas I like to play with are very UI heavy, and there’s very little that I’ve seen in GameMaker, Construct, etc, to make UI easy. They just basically leave you with standard graphic and text elements, and (granted) 9-patches.
Anyone know a game making toolkit that has a powerful UI framework? Or even a decent one?
Well… If you’re cool with C++ and can work with the structure of openFrameworks, then there ofxDatGui, which is nice. It’s an openFrameworks port of the JavaScript datgui. I know that Ridiculous Fishing was made with openFrameworks, so it shouldn’t be too much of a pain to convert from creative coding framework to game engine. The loop structure is already there, along with tons of other useful methods.
I’m sure you could integrate the JS datgui with Phaser or another JS game engine. For that matter, Phaser (and pixi.js) also have EZGUI available.
It is. I built Cults & Daggers in OF. None of its flaws are down to the engine, just the programmer :) I will say its built in GUI framework is poor though, I ended up writing my own. I wish I had known about ofxDatGui looks great I will check it out!
Oh one last note for NightGaunt OF is an OpenGL wrapper and a set of easy to use functions. But it is programming in full tooth & fang C++, which is (arguably) one of the very hardest languages to learn so if you dont know that language you will have a learning curve.
Yeah, thanks for the advice, gents, but that’s probably above my pay grade, at least at the moment. I, uh… have done some automated testing scripts in Ruby? I’m going to need something in the Unity-or-lighter end of the spectrum, I think.
For all their canned functionality for platforming mechanics or physics etc etc, your game dev environments like Game Maker just don’t give you much in terms of UI that I’ve found. Maybe I just haven’t done enough digging. Or I’m deluded into thinking it can be easier than what they give you. It’s funny because all I’m looking for is something to get it to prototype quality without a lot of fuss… Huh.
If you’re willing to fork out a few bucks, there are several plugins for GUIs in the Unity Asset Store. Here’s one:
This one is more expensive, at ~ $100:
Don’t get NGUI!!!
Seriously, just use Unity. the UI nightmares of Unity are a thing of the past.
Unity 5 includes an UI framework that pretty much does everything NGUI does (provided you know how), it is easily editable and includes very easy to customize (no code) events. Right now, in Unity it’s trivial to tie your 2D UI to your logic. I think it’s really usable and is enough for 90% of UI related tasks.
In order to do slightly fancier stuff all you need is to learn how the Animation window and the Animator Controller features work.
Try Godot. The UI stuff there is dead simple and pretty easy to wrap one’s head around, in my opinion.
I work with folks who use NGUI (some of them wish we’d move on and use Unity UI, but we’ve built so much custom stuff on top of NGUI…) so I know it’s manageable. But if I took that route, I’d just start with whatever Unity has native. I think in my heart of hearts I know that’s probably the way to go, it just requires a longer ramp up for me.
Fishbreath – Good to hear that Godot has a solid UI system. It’s on my list to check out.
Godot’s is good enough. Though keep in mind that a lot of stuff will change in 3.0.
I’m still working, making slow progress. Just finished implementing the structure for drawing the various things in the airport terminal and WASD for moving around (plus the transforms for coordinate systems between the game window and the coordinate space in the terminal).
So I finally started working on something. It’s a crazy experiment. The design goals are:
-Fit a space 4x game in a 10 minute experience.
-Exploration, development, research, diplomacy and war should be present.
-Should be replayable and allow for different winning strategies.
-Should use no text (numbers are ok) even in the tutorial.
-Information space and mechanics are discrete. No decimals, no numbers over 20 (or 10, but keep them low and graspable).
-The closer you are to winning the closer you are to losing (no end game slog).
-No micro.
The last two points are short of a given with the 10 minute limit. This is going to be a prototype of an in-progress-might-even-do-it game design I have with the same constraints except for the time (the original design aimed for 2 hours or so per game) and absence of text (which I am doing to force simplification of mechanics and maybe discover something cool).
I worked for 90 minutes today (got a basic framework) and I’m going to give me at most 24h of work to see where I can get.
It might suck, and it might not be feasible. We’ll see.
Tentative name: 4: we don’t need no Xs
I’m excited to see this one.
Your idea reminds me a little bit of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
Sounds cool! I look forward to seeing it. :)
I love Weird Worlds, but that’s more a Starflight type game. This I want to be more systemic and less content driven, but again, it’s going to be a thought nut to crack in so little time (working time and game time!!)