I have to start off by saying hello to everyone and I'm excited to start my experience here at GameDev while attending school at Full Sail University. We just began class on April 30 and have a long road ahead of us. Well to start off I want to make sure I'm going down the correct road as far as Game Design goes. I wanted to start off with a few questions that I'm hoping I could get answered from this awesome community. So let's get started...
- What are great engines I can use with my brand new Macbook Pro? I want to be able to use XCode unless there is some other IDE out there that is a lot better. I also want to make my game for multiple platforms and not just Windows or Mac alone so keep that in mind. I have a Intel Core i7 2.4GHz Quad Processor and Radeon HD 6770HD 1GB GDDR5 and 4GB DDR3 RAM. I really don't know programming and I want to at least experience it and figure out the basics. I know later on throughout our school we will experience the basics but not really hands on so any advice in this area would be awesome. I want to make a game similar to Phantasy Star Online and the new PSO2 that is currently in development.
- I have the id Tech 4 Engine Source Code that John Carmack released awhile back and thought about heavily modding the engine into my own just like others have done such as Infinity Ward and Valve. It really is such a great engine and could be a great start to my own game engine but I know this is going to involve getting a lot of help from experienced engine developers to even start working on this subject. I guess my question for this topic is would it be a good start for game development and how well will it work with platforms such as Mac, iOS, and Android? I'm not saying my game is going to be made for all these platforms but I just want to know how much flexibility I have when it comes to game engines.
- Our school never gave us any great software for game development so currently I only have Blender, Gimp/Photoshop, and XCode currently installed on my system. Any advice on other pieces of software I could use? I prefer to develop on my Mac platform for the time being.
- Online multiplayer MMO style networking similar to PSO is what I will be looking at where all players will be able to communicate with one another is some fashion but when a lobby/room is created, it is very limited to anywhere from 4-6 players. Any ideas on this subject? Would I be able to implement something like this into id Tech 4 or other game engines? This is very important to me as this will be a huge part of my game.
- Last but not least, any feedback about my questions would really be helpful as at this stage in school I barely know what I'm doing. I know the basics of game development but actually carving everything out is why I'm currently in school in the first place so please let me know what you think.