/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

Unity for 3D

Game Maker for 2D

>beginning devs

Make an engine from scratch. You DO want to learn real gamedev, don't you?

it is tradition to make at least one game in gamemaker.

>>24714

Take this guy's advice with a grain of salt.

>>24718

Making an engine is good craic lad.

>>24726

While this isn't bad advice, per se, it's really, really easy to get bogged down with the trivialities of building an engine that are taken care of when you use a prebuilt engine like Game Maker, and a starter nodev could easily get so lost in just making their engine work that they get overwhelmed and just quit altogether. Up for debate, obviously, but I feel the better path of game dev is to learn the process of making a game itself before learning the intricacies of building the engine itself.

It's like learning how to paint, then experimenting with the actual types of paint you're using.

>>24728

This. Engine work and actual deving are two different beasts. You're gonna take quite a while to do the first one until you get to the actual game making part.

Your first game(s) will not be so complex that you need to make a specialized engine for it. Once you're capable of increasing the scope of your projects and notice the limitations of Game Maker or whatever it's safe to move on and even then there's other engines.

Unless you're Carmack-tier and all you want to do is code.

>>24731

I actually can't get gamemaker to run a test game, so I have no clue if I'm fucking up or not

I got the steam version, so that might be the problem.

>>24741

GameMaker Studio user here.

I can only warn you from my past experiences that you should get as far away from the Steam version as possible.

It fucks up on updates far too often, and is generally a huge annoyance to deal with.

If you can, get them to switch your licenses to the non-Steam version.

>>24752

Now now, there's nothing wrong with Game Maker unless the dev is actively being lazy with it.

>>24747

k

>>24755

the one good part is that it's easy to use, so people can get into making games and eventually move to a non-complete-shit engine

>>24764

this is a fucking myth

the retarded hoops you have to jump through are a million times more confusing than anything unity could ever throw at you. the only people that think game maker is easier are the people that have never tried another engine

>>24780

Having used GML for a number of years before moving to other languages, I can say with surety that it's contrived, the best example being the strange pseudo-OOP. I've seen many a "wat do?" with scripts attached that boggle your mind which would have been inconsequential had the person learnt another language for at least a fortnight. A clever programmer (theSnidr on the game maker forums comes to mind) can work wizardry with it, but they have to work within and around the constraints set by the engine rather than using it for their purposes. I'll post my game maker stash from my other computer (worked with GM8) to show you guys how I did some stuff. Many unfinished, or barely started projects in there, but a few neat things as well.

>>24755

>>NO THREADING

So, you had a problem and decided to use threads. Now you have two problems.

>>24818

Well as I said, GML is impractical choice of scripting language. I know JS didn't existed at a time, but they could've at least used Lua or Tcl.

Poor programmers exist everywhere. But as far as paradigm goes, it's pretty much C, but without pointers, juggling which constitutes large fraction of C programming.

Regarding "OOP", GameMaker's "objects" are not abstract objects, they're in-game objects that can carry sprites and scripts and whatnot.