A while ago, I finished my first incomplete game project in years. It was made in a program called Scratch, which is pretty much a programming language for kids. Your source code is always public and you can only play your creations either online or in Scratch itself. Why did I use it? It's for an online Harvard course I'm taking. http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Cats777/2893155 All the shitty graphics, sound, and music were made by me, except for the Game Over music.
Haha, I love the name and the endless rooms. I remember using Scratch back in high school. We had to make a game for "environmental awareness" then present the game and compete against other schools at some conference. The conference basically played out as: Judges found every bug in our game. PR team never showed up. Development team ran around the building pretending to be spies while recording ourselves being idiots. Good times... good times.
Have ever heard of RPG Maker XP? It has a basic interface, but also a complex-coders one. Really easy to use and code after learning the basics. What you think about it?
I've used every iteration of RPG Maker, even RM95. Scratch is less about making things and more about learning the ropes of actual programming.
Have you considered making a game using a C-Like language? I've been playing around with Java since I need to get away from .NET.
I remember using Scratch when I first started Comp Sci. At the time I didn't think much of it, but in hindsight I'm happy to have moved well beyond it. Concerning the game, it's more or less of the highest Scratch quality. I'd love to see something made by you using an 'actual' programming language.
I'm considering learning C#, since I heard it was easy-mode C++ (I took 4 semesters of C++ and I probably only retained the first semester). I made a game in VB.NET for my VB.NET course, but I can't seem to find it. It was the first game project I've ever semi-completed.
C# is essentially "Not Java", as in Microsoft didn't want to package Java by default with Sun anymore to avoid legal and financial issues that would arise, but they wanted their own implementation so they took the structures of java and re-named things. The nice thing is though if you're aiming to build windows explicit then you can use Visual Studio to build C# applications. As far as easy mode C++ goes, this is kinda true because languages like Java, C#, C++, python to a lesser extent and perl somewhat as well are all C-Like languages at the core. As in, they were all derived from some form of C or another. To be honest, you'd probably have a far easier time learning Java over C# as it's straightforward versus having to play around with the Visual Studio environment and getting used to how picky stuff is in it. But, if you're looking for rapid application development then yeah stick with Visual Studio and C# since you can easily take advantage of a drag and drop interface for creating most controls.
I wish you good luck with that. Making the right choice is no easy task. I'm currently passing my final year of study in game dev. If you ever need help for anything related to dev I'd be glad to provide any!
What exactly is it you do? Programming or stuff like theory as in Level Design, study of player behavior in certain environments, etc?
Programming is the right word. Our course focus mostly on 3D though. geo maths/algo and physical simulation.
