View Single Post
  #8  
Old 07-25-2016, 01:32 AM
ludovician ludovician is offline
Scrawny Gnoll


Join Date: Jun 2015
Posts: 26
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Secrets [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Not bad at all for your first game attempt; I'd recommend continuing other projects once it is completed (if it's something that makes you happy - DON'T ever get roped into this for a living if it's something you aren't passionate about). You'll want to try and make other games and learn from your feedback. Being in game development as a programmer now, I can't offer much from the design perspective, but...
Unfortunately, in the AAA games world, designers are underpaid and short of creating a hit product in the past and bringing that talent to another studio, you probably won't find work short of working for yourself. So if you REALLY want to design your own games, you're gonna have to do everything. Here's some tips:

The game needs to be object-oriented. You appear to be using yoyogames.com's GameMaker software. I am not familiar with this program however I can tell that it's meant to be transparent to the end user using the product. This severely limits your potential for object-oriented programming. An engine like Unity will teach you the basics of OOP and inheritance via C-style languages so you can eventually transfer your work into the 3D or 2D-in-3D worldspace and beyond.

Imagine if you could have a base player object, but instead of equipping it with weapons that you drag and drop and cannot change the functionality of, each weapon would be another class object that you'd attach to the base object itself in some way (in laymans terms).

This is all possible in Unity's Gameobject and UE4's Blueprints. It is better to learn those concepts early and not getting spoiled by someone doing all of that work for you.

I recommend reading up on Unity and abandoning the engine you are using now. It will teach you more in the long run. Even if you use Unity's asset store, it will teach you more about programming than any other game engine while still retaining the 'fun factor' of indie design principles.

If I was making a new 2D Game, Unity is primed to spoil you without forcing you to take shortcuts due to technical limitations. If you want to delve into the rendering engine, though, you should definitely use Unreal 4 instead.

Hope that helps, and good luck.

Hey, thanks for checking it out and thanks for all that!

I'm new-ish to programming, self taught in everything. A little C++, javascript, etc.

Gamemaker touts itself as being object oriented, and its language is based on C++ very heavily. My amateurish work probably doesn't show that off, though. Each object in game has it's own lines of code that reference eachother when necessary as well as global functions running the show. I had to program all of the collision detection, movement, etc myself.

Unity was actually next on my list to learn. I have a friend who's pushing it on me heavily, and it's nice to hear from a second source that it's worthwhile. It's actually already installed on my desktop!

This is the first project I've ever finished, so I've gained a ton of confidence and motivation to move onto the next thing.

Your comment is really appreciated, thank you!
Last edited by ludovician; 07-25-2016 at 01:37 AM..