I recently got an idea to make a game which would take place in my school. It would have pixel graphics and side scrolling. You could choose one of 3 characters and go through the whole intire school, which i plan to create. Things to do in this game would be like distracting teachers to escape from class, evading hall monitors and so on. I plan to put alot of content into this game. I thought about programming it using flash actionscript but now i am not sure because of how much i have in plan for this game. What would be a good way for a begginner programmer to create a game like the one i have in mind

Well there are probaly quite a few ways fo doing it.
i would recommend SDL if you are still fairly new toprograming but not knowing what languages you can do i cant say alot about what you should or shouldnt do. Direct Draw would probaly work fairly well too.

Please post back what languages you can do or have some knowledge in and mabye i can be of more help.

Based on what you've said, I'd recommend using Multimedia Fusion to create your game. Side scrolling and pixel graphics are simple within MMF, you just have to be creative. Give it a go - http://www.clickteam.com

The good thing about Multimedia Fusion is that it was developed using the engine for their previous software (The Games Factory) which was designed exclusively for game development. Therefore, for beginning programmers, they have pre-made movement types you can assign to Active objects. MMF's functionality can also be extended through the use of extensions, and they actually have a Platform Movement extension out, look it up on the website's extensions database. If you don't want to program the movement yourself, you can just use the extension. It seems that the platform movement won't be too advanced in your game anyway, so whatever works is fine.

All in all, MMF's THE software to use in your case. Wow, I sound like I'm advertising, but seriously, no lie, check it out if you haven't already.

Besides that, I wouldn't recommend ActionScript because working with Flash won't be very fun if you want bitmapped graphics. Flash is great for vector graphics and all, but from what I've seen, rasterized graphics are a pain.

GameMaker is an option, but statiscally speaking, I'd say the game produced using it will most likely suck, esp. if you're a beginner. I mean, I haven't seen too many GOOD games that have been developed with it. Most of the games I've seen made with the software are some really buggy, glitched up pieces of crap. There are some good ones, but my opinion is this: those who can make something good with GameMaker deserve to move on to something else.

Haha, but don't take my word for it! I might be kind of biased because I just had such a great introduction to programming through MMF. It was what ultimately got me into learning C++, so go for it!

All right, peace!

- Dalal

MMF does cost money tho. And i am on a very limited budget. Looking to spend no monkey at all limited

I just wanted to clear up a few things in this thread.

First off why are people trying to disuade him from Flash/Actionscript? This game is easily doable using that and it is probably the best medium to do it in for someone new. I see mention of SDL, DirectDraw, and others... but why? There is absolutely zero solid reason for this.

Also the person who posted about raster graphics in Flash being hard, really shouldn't be posting at all without knowing what they are talking about. Working with raster is drop dead simple in Flash/Flex and you could use anything from the easy high level stuff down to the Bitmap API.

I would definitely give Flash/AS a go for building this type of game.