Tag: clickteam

#oneaday Day 794: Brilliant Game Idea, No Technical Talent? No Problem!

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I’ve mentioned a number of times on this ‘ere blog that I don’t really have the knack of programming. I can sort of do it if I have plenty of reference material to hand or if I’m following a tutorial, but it’s the sort of thing that if I don’t do it regularly, it just all falls out of my head and makes a mess on the carpet.

Despite not being able to program, however, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make my own games at times, and I know at least a few of you reading might be interested in how to go about doing that for yourself. So I thought I’d gather a bit of information regarding game maker packages that I’ve used in the past (or at least heard of) in the hope that you might find something that tickles your fancy.

So without further ado, then, here goes.

Clickteam products: Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion

My first experience with making games that weren’t written in Atari BASIC was with Clickteam’s Klik and Play, an application for Windows that allowed you to create games without any knowledge of programming whatsoever. The program actually contained everything you might need to get creating straight away — it included basic art tools, a library of sound effects and music to use in your games as well as plenty of example sprites, background art and interface elements.

Klik and Play’s strength was in its ease of use. Handling all aspects of how a game worked was very much like a logic puzzle, or a series of “If… Then…” statements. For example “If” the player presses the fire button, “Then” the spaceship they control should shoot a missile. “If” an enemy collides with the spaceship, “Then” a fart sound should be played and the player’s lives should be reduced by one.

One great thing that Klik and Play did was provide several means to determine all the possible conditions you might want to test for in your game. You could create the statements manually if you knew in advance what was going to happen, or you could enter the “Step Through Editor”, start your game running and every time something that hadn’t happened before happened for the first time, Klik and Play would ask you what you wanted it to do. After a short while of using this tool, you started to think logically about all the possible things that might happen throughout the course of a single screen of the game you were making, and your efficiency would skyrocket. Of course, even when you know what you’re doing this is still considerably slower than a C++ wizard coding their own routines, but for those of us who always put curly braces in the wrong place, it was a godsend.

The only downside to Klik and Play was that it was fairly limited in what it could do. There weren’t many global variables to store information in, for example, making more complex games difficult to create. And file management for save games and the like was practically non-existent. You were pretty much limited to making simple arcade games — not that this was necessarily a bad thing.

Many of these issues were resolved by subsequent releases in the series. First came The Games Factory, which added more global variables, the ability to have a scrolling screen for levels that were bigger than a single screen in size, and more sophisticated event handling. This was then followed by Multimedia Fusion, which added even more high-end features designed for people who wanted to build full applications and screensavers rather than just games. Most recently, Clickteam have launched The Games Factory 2 and Multimedia Fusion 2 as two separate products (with Multimedia Fusion having a pro-level “Developer” version available) which are available from their official website. The latest versions feature the ability to export to Flash for publication on the Web, and iOS app format. Android and XNA (Xbox 360) support is reportedly on the way.

RPG Maker

I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth putting in this list simply because of how full-featured it is. Having gone through a number of previous iterations on both PC and consoles, Enterbrain’s role-playing game construction kit RPG Maker is now one of the most flexible but easy-to-use game making tools on the planet. It doesn’t even have to be a role-playing game that you make with it — if you’re looking to create a visual novel or top-down perspective adventure game, it’s a great solution for that, too.

RPG Maker comes with a ton of preset graphics, sounds and music for you to use in your own games allowing you to get started straight away. All you need to do is draw the maps, write the story and test it out, all of which can be done via the program’s simple interface. Meanwhile, more advanced users can easily add custom graphics, sounds, music, enemies, items, equipment and characters, and people who actually know a bit of coding can even rewrite the game engine using the program’s “RGSS” scripting language to create brand new menu and battle systems. And don’t worry if you don’t have a clue how to do that yourself but find the built-in systems to be not so good — using community-developed scripts has long been an expected part of RPG Maker development. The community is lively, helpful, full of ideas and covers a broad range of talents — so if you have a great idea for a story but have no idea how to write original music or draw custom graphics, you can probably find someone to help you out.

RPG Maker’s latest version is known as RPG Maker VX Ace and is the version to go for out of the three currently available on the official website.

Adventure Game Studio

Free tool Adventure Game Studio allows you to create point and click adventure games of the LucasArts or Sierra ilk. There’s a little bit of a learning curve involved in getting started with this one, and it doesn’t come with many sample resources to get started with, so you’ll have to draw your own graphics (or recruit a friend who knows what they’re doing).

Once you get the hang of it, though, you’ll be able to create convincing point-and-click adventures featuring plenty of dialogue (fully voiced if you have friends willing to step in for voice acting duties) and object-based puzzles. Lest you worry about the quality of a free tool, Adventure Game Studio has been used to create a number of very well-received projects, including the popular Ben There, Dan That! games.

AGS is free, unlike the previous titles on this list. Get it here.

Ren’Py

Ren’Py is a visual novel engine designed for creating combinations of text, music, sound effects and visuals to tell a story. It’s relatively simple to use to get a basic non-interactive story up and running, and a bit of experimentation will get you putting together multi-path adventures with plenty of choices in no time. Like AGS, though, it doesn’t come with many sample resources, so you’d better get handy with a Wacom tablet and scribbling some art before you get started on putting your game together. That or, again, ask a friend.

Despite the inherent (and usually deliberate) limitations of the visual novel genre, Ren’Py is a surprisingly flexible tool. For some great examples of what’s possible with it, check out Christine Love’s three games Digital: A Love Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, all of which were created using Ren’Py (and all of which employ some fascinating storytelling techniques that are unique to the interactive medium).

Ren’Py is also free. Grab it here.

Other stuff I haven’t tried

There’s a wealth of other free and paid game making software out there, most of which I haven’t tried. Here’s a few you may want to take a look at.

Game Maker from YoYoGames is well-regarded as a flexible tool which can be used to make a wide variety of different games for the Web, standalone release or mobile release.

Stencyl is a tool designed to make it easy to create Flash, iOS and Android games without the need for coding.

GameSalad is a Mac-only product similar to Stencyl, designed for making iOS, Web and standalone games without needing to know coding.

The Game Creators carry a range of products for aspiring developers of various experience levels, ranging from those who have an idea of how to work with BASIC to those who simply want to draw a map for a first-person shooter and run around in it.

If you’ve come across any more, feel free to share in the comments for the benefit of anyone else who may be interested.

#oneaday Day 696: Exclusive Preview!

I love making games — the main thing that stops me from doing it more often is the fact that I can’t get my head around programming. Perhaps it’s the fact that I didn’t enjoy maths that much at school; perhaps it’s the fact I have trouble relating the abstract code to what happens on screen; perhaps I’m just too lazy to learn properly. (I’m still badass at Atari BASIC.)

Regardless of all that, though, if an app comes along and offers me the tools I need to realise my visions, even partially, I’m all over it like a rash — and I’m normally able to push the boundaries of such applications to do unconventional things a little outside of their normal “comfort zone”. Such was the case with Clickteam’s excellent Klik and Play series, and such was the case with RPG Maker 2000, which I originally came across a good few years ago and decided that the best way to learn would be to put together a game using the built-in tools and resources.

Thus, The Adventures of Dave Thunder was born. Dave Thunder was the hero of the piece, named after a guy whose name we found in a person’s lost phone at university. We were all a bit drunk at the time, so one of my flatmates decided it would be a good idea to phone Dave Thunder and tell him what an awesome name he had. He was at “The Golden Arches”. A legend was born.

But I digress. The Adventures of Dave Thunder was quite popular among my friends because it was deliberately built as a big in-joke. I’m not sure if it would have appealed to anyone outside my immediate circle of friends had it ever been finished, but it was a lot of fun to make, and I still have fond memories of Sweary Link, tired of his life as a silent protagonist and revealing that he’s a bit of a stroppy git underneath.

Sadly, The Adventures of Dave Thunder is lost to the mists of time and a failed hard drive. I’m a bit upset about this, as it had quite a lot of work put into it. Okay, I didn’t make any of the graphics or music for it, but the writing was all mine, and I found it quite funny at least. What other RPG can you play where the healer in your party is Harold Bishop from Neighbours, who became an actual bishop after his wife Madge turned into a vampire?

I digress again. I acquired a copy of RPG Maker VX a while back and just recently have something of a hankerin’ to make something new. Referring back to what I said yesterday, too, I have some ready-made characters to draw on, too, so I figured why not give them their very own game?

I’ve already started designing (well, scripting) what I want this game to be and I’m quite pleased with the direction I think it will take. I’m going to try and avoid cliche wherever possible and put together something that is amusing, entertaining and (mostly) unconventional. Sure, there’ll still be standard RPG mechanics in there — I don’t know enough about VX‘s scripting language to deviate too much from the standard engine, after all. That said, I’m using one excellent plugin to take a less-frequently seen approach to exploration, inspired by some recent titles I’ve been playing — more details on that once I have a prototype up and running. (No, it’s not a roguelike — I haven’t yet found a good script for that.)

So hopefully over the course of the next few weeks, months, years, I’ll be able to share occasional progress updates on The Official RPG of Pete’s Blog Stickmen, or whatever I end up calling it. For now, suffice to say that it is a thing that exists, and I will be using it as a Big Creative Project to do when I’m feeling bored or uninspired. The long-term intention is to put together the whole thing single-handedly with deliberately crude graphics (they’re stickmen, after all) and a soundtrack composed by me. Whether all that will actually happen will remain to be seen, but it’ll be an interesting experiment if nothing else. I’ll be concentrating on getting the game right first, then adding polish like an original soundtrack afterwards if I feel it’s worth it.

So there you are.World-first exclusive reveal and all that. BE EXCITED.