Bakerman on 6/6/2012 at 11:55
I'll put in a word for (
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d) Torque, since I've licensed it and spent several years working with it over two major versions (TGE, then skipped TGEA and now at T3D 1.1). It's not free like Unity, and doesn't cross-deploy as well (no Mac or Linux support for the latest versions, though they promise they're working on Mac support).
That said, I do love it. Mostly because it includes full source and I can mess around with it to my heart's content. This also means the community does great stuff with it - Torque's community is large and productive, though I haven't used Unity to be able to compare. But if source access isn't something that's important to you I would seriously consider Unity instead. Its editors seem more polished from what I've seen - though Torque has come along in leaps and bounds in that area in recent releases. ALso, lots of Torque relies on scripting, so if you're doing anything beyond the absolute basics, you'll need to a bit of programming (TorqueScript is a C-like language, not too hard to pick up but has its weird quirks).
You may be interested in (
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-2d) T2D, GarageGames' 2D engine. It's very user-friendly - I managed to get a pretty decent platformer prototype working in an afternoon or two, having never used it before (though being quite familiar with the 3D engine). But again, I have fairly little to compare to besides pygame, which isn't really a relevant comparison :p.
demagogue on 6/6/2012 at 14:40
Yeah Unity is good if you either have a place to yoink assets from or you want pretty basic stuff you can model yourself. That's probably the biggest practical hurdle. On the forums, there's a thread for setting up artist-coder alliances, where one guy makes all the assets and another guy makes the game out of them. And there are places out there that host free assets (not to mention big mods or homebrew games where you can get to all their assets). For my little project on Unity, I just swiped some free models & textures and tweaked them. But I think for any game you really want to stand out, usually you want to be doing your own assets anyway.
nicked on 6/6/2012 at 16:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
Now for 2D the options really open up. But I'd say (
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/windows) Game Maker is best & most user friendly all-around thing. It's what Nifflas's games are made on (Knytt, Within a Deep Forest, etc). But it's like $40. Edit: Sorry there is a free version.
Actually I'm pretty sure Nifflas uses (
http://www.clickteam.co.uk/mmf2.php) Multimedia Fusion, which is the program I'm most familiar with. It's more powerful in many ways than Game Maker, slightly more complicated, but still user-friendly and good for non-programming minds like mine. It's what I've used to create (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m2KdQaedPw&feature=plcp) Gun Bastard. However, it is more expensive - the entry level version is £35, but for commercial use you'd need the £75 version at least.
Renault on 6/6/2012 at 17:37
Anyone have experience with (
http://www.3dgamestudio.com/) 3D Game Studio? Looks promising for a novice like me, although I haven't fired it up yet.
catbarf on 6/6/2012 at 17:42
I am going to echo the recommendation of Unity, I've used it for a couple of classes and it's a very powerful way to quickly develop a game.
Volitions Advocate, Unity does in fact have primitives built-in. My teams have used them to create collision objects for game demos and then turned them invisible, rather than import all our assets and create unique collision maps for all of them. You'll need to import assets to make the final game, but prototyping is very doable with the built-in primitives and terrain functions.
The main problem, IMO, with the free version of Unity is that while there is dynamic lighting, the free version only has a very cheap vertex-based model where objects don't block light and nothing casts shadows. I guess for a simple game it's not a big deal, but lighting has been a big thing in a couple of the projects I've worked on and it's been a hassle.
Renault on 6/6/2012 at 18:48
@P Forth - Woah, haven't seen you in forever. Nice work in FPSC, that's pretty awesome. Are you going to try to put in AI and objectives and the like and make it a fully functioning level?
Edit: And btw, that's probably the best Thief-oriented location label I've seen to date. :cool:
Volitions Advocate on 6/6/2012 at 18:56
Quote Posted by catbarf
Volitions Advocate, Unity does in fact have primitives built-in. My teams have used them to create collision objects for game demos and then turned them invisible, rather than import all our assets and create unique collision maps for all of them.
I stand corrected. Last time I used it there wasn't a function for it. I even asked on the Unity forums and was told by several people that you had to do anything that wasn't terrain in a 3d program. This is pretty good news.
demagogue on 6/6/2012 at 18:57
Quote Posted by nicked
Actually I'm pretty sure Nifflas uses (
http://www.clickteam.co.uk/mmf2.php) Multimedia Fusion, which is the program I'm most familiar with. It's more powerful in many ways than Game Maker, slightly more complicated, but still user-friendly and good for non-programming minds like mine.
Ah maybe I knew that and was getting the two confused. Anyway, whichever one was used to make Nifflas's games, that's the one I'd recommend. If it was MMFusion then it's worth it.
