Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Third Time's the Charm

This blog has been dead for quite a while. Some of the readers that I know personally know why.

As I tried to hash out the lighting in Descend, I found the whole system was slowing down.  So while trying to figure out if I should scrap the lighting system, I was thinking about my approach to creating this game.  I feel full heatedly that I could to everything I set out to do in the game with my abilities in coding in C# and using XNA.  However, I have other things I like to enjoy doing, involving music, friends, and my fiance.  So I stopped, setting down the game to pursue other hobbies.

However, my love for problem solving keeps pushing me back to coding.  I've researched a handful of game development tools looking for an easier way to handle a 2D multiplayer platformer game.  At first I was looking at Unity.  It looks great, it's easy to use, works with C# and ports out to many systems.  It's great with 3D graphics and is set up for game development. However, it extremely lacks in 2D gaming support.  People have found ways around it, but the more I tried it, the bigger the headache.

Recently I have been trying Game Maker by YoYoGames.  I'm weary as it has it's own handful of issues.  They created a game development studio that allows even a caveman to put together a simple game in about 5 minutes with drag and drop features.  It only works well with 2D graphics and uses it's own coding language.  It has multiplayer support and many built in features that should allow me to create the game faster, not having to worry about the little things.  The code language isn't hard to follow, and you can expand the program's capabilities greatly through adding your own code.

Well, we'll see how it goes.  I'm starting from scratch, but I'm hoping I'll catch up to where I was before in no time.

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