My apologies for posting this to the general SK forums, but I couldn't find a better place to post such a question. I'm considering the development of a game of my own but I'm a little unsure as to which technologies I should be using to implement it. Most of my experience is in Java, so I was excited to find Getdown and other such libraries posted on your website and available for public use. On the other hand the forums community at games gardens appears to be all but dead, which concerns me. I'm doing this for personal development and potential career advancement, so I'm not expecting to build the game of the century, but I would like it to have fairly robust multiplayer capabilities. I'm aiming for a 2D fighter that forgoes the use of sprites (yeah that sounds weird, but I'm fairly certain I have a way to make it work), and multilayer not only insures public visibility, but also circumvents the immediate need for AI. Would XNA/C++ or HTML5/Canvas be more appropriate? I know my description is fairly vague, and I can provide additional details if necessary. Thanks in advance for your advice.
A Little Advice Devs?
I am not a professional game developer, but I once spent multiple years failing at making a hobby game, so my advice might be valuable.
Art (textures, character models, levels, sounds, etc.) is 90% of the work. Coding is something like 10% of the work --- especially if you use other people's libraries heavily. Also, if you have to learn some new language to get the job done, then learning that new language is less than 1% of the work. So you may be optimizing the wrong part of the process already.
If you're doing 2D without sprites, then you're probably drawing everything in real time, using rectangles, splines, fills, etc.? I predict that sprites will be faster. Modern graphics hardware is very good at the task of moving pre-determined pixels onto the screen.
Whatever you do, test your code frequently. Aim for a minimal set of features, and test. Then add a feature and test. Then add a feature and test.
I don't know what Games Gardens is, but there are tons of game design sites on the web, and there are tons of free game engines too.
When you demo your game for other people, they will care only about the art. They will not be able to see that you organized subsystem A really well, or that you wrote elegant code to handle task B. So get ready not to receive praise.
That said, I learned a lot from trying to make a game. If you enjoy the process, and don't have your heart set on the finished product, then you might enjoy the project. Good luck.
Thanks for the input. A couple of the libraries I mentioned were developed by three rings, which is primarily why I decided to post here in hopes of finding out if they were still in active use and development. Games Gardens is a free software library developed by Three Rings for making networked Java games. Most of what I'm referring to can be found here: http://www.threerings.net/code/.
I wasn't trying to avoid learning a new language. In fact I'm asking these questions up front to make sure I put in the time to become acquainted with the right language for the job, the first time, rather than finding myself making a change part way through. As far as sprites are concerned, one of the things I was toying with was variable start-up and recovery times based on the relative positioning of the character at the time an instruction is input. I have a number of other off beat mechanics I want to try out, and while graphics are important on a finished product I'm more concerned with solid design and game-play. I'm looking to build something that's enjoyable to create, and that also shows proficiency to potential employers. If I get a finished product out of the deal that's just icing on the cake. Oh, and you can be sure there will be plenty of prototyping and test cases will be written before implementation, so no worries there.
One of the nice added benefits of creating this, is that if nothing else I'll end up with a framework for the creation and animation of 2D characters. I'm planning to build an additional wrapper application around this to aid with defining animations for specific moves and characters. In fact, I wouldn't mind if the finished product was not a fighting game itself, but rather a prototyping tool for fighting games in general. We'll see how far I get with the concept, but given that goal I'd like to at least start in the right place.
Edit: As a side note, I can't help but feel like my hopes at finding out if an active community for the Three Rings libraries exist has been dashed.
as strange it may sound, you should move this to gremlin chatter. besides, there are some game developers among us players, and OOO devs have their things to do.
to move a thread: above your first post, edit, dropdown menu, save. please don't leave a shadow copy.