Well, such games KIND of exist. RPGMaker and Fighter Maker on the Playstation come to mind, as well as the RPGMakers on the PC. I have no experience with either of them (except a bit with RPGMaker 2000 on the PC) but they seem to be what you''re talking about. My question, however, is this: How much fun is that stuff, really? I mean, to some extent I agree it would be great to be able to customize games that thoroughly. But my point is: I suck at graphics. I''m a programmer, not a 3d modeler, not a 2d artist either. I don''t really know how much I''d enjoy customizing everything in the games I play. Considering I do all that customizing making my own games, there are times I prefer to just sit down and play what someone else made. As long as you have an option to use premade characters, I suppose it''s a good idea, but its almost a certainty that if you are supposed to create your own characters that the premade characters would be poorly done. If that''s the cost of things, I''d find it legitimately more fun to just play Soul Calibur.

I like the thought of designing games, that''s how I got into programming. Still, I doubt anyone would be able to make an editor that would be perfectly geared toward my purposes. Because that''s the case, I''d rather just make my video game dreams come true myself, and enjoy quality work by other people in the process.

One last point- If these programs existed, and everyone really COULD just make their own dream games, that''d probably kill the whole gaming industry, wouldn''t it? =P (exaggeration, I know)

Well... There''s my thoughts before I take the time to think them through and express them intelligently. I don''t have time to think.

-Arek the Absolute

It''s an interesting idea, yes, it would be fun. There was even one for fighting games, can''t remember what it was called but it was released for PlayStation. Your idea sounds like it would take it farther, I''m pretty sure the one for PS just had a stock library you could mix''n''match.

But... (there''s always a but)

I don''t think it would be likely to get published, at least not by any of the big houses, they''d be thinking of the economics of it--catering to the minority is never going to fly with the business-types. As a labor-of-love project, released over the net and begging for donations, it might work, but that''s about the best I see for it.

Hope this doesn''t fall under your category of "stupid replies"

RPG Maker is very newbie oriented and the sound is horrid if you have the DirectX SDK installed. It''s also very hard to implement your own features, menuing system, etc.

I don''t mean this to be like a sales pitch, but there are better systems out there, from my design of RPGdev to the RPGDX community''s Gia Edit project . There''s others too, if I''m not mistaken a majority of them are open source.

These game creation kits can be found almost everywhere, but very few of them are worth even a first look. We have to do these ourselves if we want any that we''ll actually enjoy for more than a week or two.


Chris ''coldacid'' Charabaruk <ccharabaruk@meldstar.com> <http://www.meldstar.com/ccharabaruk/>
Meldstar Studios <http://www.meldstar.com/> - Creation, cubed.

This message double ROT-13 encrypted for additional security.

I too have been inspired by the likes of RoboForge, and I am now working on a similar concept. The big difference with my approach however, is that after designing the mechanical side of your battle machine, designing an AI is optional. You can instead opt to create a manual control system, mapping joystick or mouse input for example, and play head to head against other people rather than AIs. Designing the machine will be accomplished through a simple editor, and creating the control mappings will be done with a simple scripting language. So the game will be quite accessible to a broader market than just the tech-heads like ourselves. There will be several different competition leagues, with varying degrees of AI assistance allowed in each. At one end of the scale, no AIs allowed, at the other end, no human intervention allowed, and in the middle of the range will be leagues where a certain amount of human-AI cooperation is allowed (for example, a human pilot using AI targeting, or vice versa).
Also, it is not simply about combat. There is a range of game types, from straight combat, through combat racing, to non-violent racing and obstacle courses (in zero gee, with newtonian physics to contend with, an obstacle course is not as simple as it sounds).
I figure that if you want to appeal to large numbers of potential buyers, you''ve got to offer a lot of different ways to play, and a lot of different ways to be good at the game. You can be a great programmer, but have crap reflexes. Or you can be adept with a joystick, but have no idea what a variable is. Either way, my game will have something to offer.