I don’t know how many of you guys are familiar with thePirateKart, or even Glorious Trainwrecks in general, but to put it in terms most of you are probably familiar with, the Glorious Trainwrecks game-creating events are a bit like Speed IFs for Klik and Play (although it’s pretty tool agnostic): People make a game in about 2 hours, and then show them off when they’re done. (Most of the time they don’t have themes, though.)
What I’m getting at here is, there’s a new Pirate Kart that’s going to be shown off at GDC, and I think it would be nice to get some of the IF community to join in. The main time we’ll be making games is the weekend of February 25-26th, but a bunch of people are making games for this already (including me), and they’re setting it up so that games can be added up to GDC weekend. Online playable games are preferable to those that would need an interpreter, but z-code games, at least, are okay. Does any of this sound interesting to you guys?
Yes, it sounds great. There’s been a few IF games in Karts past. SpindleyQ even is known to come to Seattle IF meetups when possible. Thanks for the heads-up [emote]:)[/emote].
This looks pretty fun. I used to make the worst platform games using Klik & Play, the most impressive involving multi-linear progression, and a bathtub protagonist.
Hehehe… I started work on what I thought would be a good platformer with K+P, but my ambitions outstripped its abilities (at least in my head) after one screen. Its physics are so generous to all objects in the game that it’s hard to constrain characters to ladders and platforms.
I’ve got the one screen I did preserved on Youtube in all its 11 second glory:
Oh wow, that’s way more smooth than I ever managed. I recognise the Amazon sprite and those sound effects! I think I’d like to make a graphical game one day, but the amount of work needed even for something simple is staggering.
I agree that to make a graphical game is a huge amount of work in any case, but things are definitely better now than they were 10 years ago.
Have you looked into using Unity (any platform)? Or GameSalad (Mac only, build to Ipad, Iphone and android)? Or GameMaker (PC only)?
I tried Unity a little and it looks great, but I wanted to make a 2D game, and its one shortcoming is it only operates in a 3d environment. You can force it to act in a 2d fashion, after a fashion, but I found that a bit uncomfortable.
I’m using GameSalad right now to develop a game for the iPad. It’s a purely 2d system with excellent built in physics… which Im not using as I’m making an overhead adventure/action game [emote]:)[/emote]
I can’t speak on GameMaker as I haven’t used it personally.
But all of these systems are contemporary equivalents of K+P; that is, visual programming languages/environments. And Unity and GameSalad are free for the core versions. For higher-faluting versions you need to buy a Pro license, but it’s not like a demo situation - the free versions do a helluva lot.
So is a text game (or indeed most things worth doing). I’ve made one graphical adventure game and a bunch of smaller things, but I doubt I’ll ever manage to create a text game.
Each thing takes as long as it takes. All I meant was that producing an asset for a graphical game - divorced from issues of designing and programming any particular game - tends to take longer than producing the same asset for a vaguely equivalent text game. Speaking with both my visual artist and writer hats on, if I was given the brief to conjure up a forest as quickly as possible, I’d choose to write a description of it rather than spend the hours to a week it may take me to draw the forest.