A friend of mine wants to make a game (or two) but he can’t find a good program to do it with. I don’t know any good ones either. He will pay for them, and he doesn’t care if it’s free.
He is doing a 3D environment, but he will try a 2D if there is a good, easy to use, free program that you can create it with.
He has Windows 7, so it has to be compatible with that. Otherwise, it will just take up space until he gets rid of it.
He doesn’t want to make a mod of anything.
Any suggestions?
Game Maker 8
If he could learn DarkBasic, that would be a good start. It’s a powerful, yet simple coding program that contains a 3D engine. Not sure if that’s what he’s looking for though. Does he want a really simplified ‘game maker’ or a full out coding utility?
Either a program like Gamer Maker or he will need programming skills for an engine like torque-2d ( https://www.torquepowered.com/products/torque-2d ).
Depends how well is skills are and his ability to adapt and learn.
He can write his own engine, use an existing one, or adapt an existing one.
There’s supposedly some really slick freeware engines that come with easy-to-use interfaces and everything, but I wouldn’t know where to find those.
he could use the good old quake 3 engine, afaik it’s free
He could, but then he would end up wasting more time making it a 2d system rather then using an existing 2d engine.
Simple to use at first. He just wants to start with testing, not a full out attempt.
we both adapt and learn very well. we don’t have much in the way of programming skills.
well 2D you can always go back to flash. There are some powerful actionscript engines out there plus seeing as it’s flash you get a quick return on investment. Plus x-browser & x-platform.
Down side of this is that the knowledge gained doesn’t translate too well to a 3d engine. (with the exception of some programming styles or routines)
Actionscript is super duper easy. Provided your friend doesn’t suck at Flash, he can have a decent platformer going in under an hour.
Upload it to Newgrounds with an ad in the preloader and make a few bucks + there’s potentially hundreds of thousands of unique players
What did they do the new Rayman game coming out with?
They were talking about… wait…
Holy shit
It’s free to use and Java’s one of the most simple programming languages out there. Unity uses that and it’s a mainstream engine. It’s used on games for the I-Phone, and various games on the PC, I don’t know which ones, I don’t care which ones.
I’d go with that, I tinkered around with it once or twice but decided to go onto a different engine to toy around with.
Edit: Take note, there is a free version and a “Pro” version, I’d go with the free version for basic software, then when you get the cash buy the full set of toys if you’d like.
Unreal Development Kit
Might have a bit of a learning curve, but the Unreal Engine 3 is very versatile and powerful.
I showed the pictures to him, and his jaw hit the floor. He never thought he would be able to toy with anything like this. He says thanks!
Minecraft. I’m surprised you don’t know, what with half the forum (more?) being obsessed with it right now.
^ I don’t play minecraft. And read the latter half of the sentence you quoted… I’ll leave it off there.
Edit: If your friend’s a college student and is looking for modeling, I’d look into Autodesk Resources; https://students.autodesk.com/
Having a school e-mail and being enrolled at college gives you some major advantages for utilization of some programs you feel like tinkering around with… for free. Autodesk are the makers of Maya, and yes; that’s available for your use. For free.
Since no one suggested yet, I’ll suggest RPG Maker. Yes, it’s only for RPGs, but it is very intuitive and flexible. It also has a nice set of images and the Internet is full of images for you to use.
I don’t know how is the situation now, but I think you will need to pirate it because the English version is not legal.
I am pretty sure I saw a download for it a few months ago… I could be wrong. I think that may have been adventure maker…
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