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Looking for a game engine

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Mekamani February 15, 2013 11:52 AM

1 comment, last by kburkhart84 11 years, 2 months ago

Mekamani

568

Author

February 15, 2013 11:52 AM

Hello!

I have thought about makign a game, and I would like to hear about suggestions for a 2D game. The idea is to be able to move sideways in the game, having buttons/switches, and possibly having some sort of event/dialogue system. Now it is possible to code everything by yourself, but I feel like it would be a tons of time spent on something, that is most likely done 1 million times, and probably the better way that I could ever come up with.

Basicly what I would need would be something with a good WYSIWYG editor. I thought it could be possible to do this in 3d too, where the map itself could be done in 3D, but the background is just some texture and the camera is placed in some distance of z-axis and looking directly on the scene. Also since I don't have much money, I would prefer this to be free, although I don't think there is that many engines that fullfill these requirements.

Digivance

1,724

February 15, 2013 03:01 PM

Flat Red Ball - http://flatredball.com

It's written in C# and XNA and works great for windows pc's and XBox 360 XBLI (It actually powered the 2010 Dream Build Play winner).

However do note that XNA is dead or dying in that Microsoft is no longer updating it and although they haven't "officially" announced it (to my knowledge at least) they are discontinuing it. This comes from hints like Windows 8 doesn't particularly support it, the new windows app store doesn't, new mobile devices don't support it and so on. Windows 8 PC's can still run XNA built games they will automatically run it in a default legacy mode. In short if your going for Windows PC go ahead your safe.

Other than that you will need to research what is available (and affordable) for the target platforms you want to go with. To put a 2D sprite in a 3D world you simply render the texture to a quad (a 4 vert plane). This can be done in ANY engine, if you want a more cross platform 3D oriented editor I highly recommend Unity as it is free for all PC flavors and relatively inexpensive to port for mobiles. Be warned though you can NOT get on consoles any time in the near future (until Microsoft and Sony publicly announce the new consoles later this year and release the new market limitation's for indies). At this point the only safe console targetting that we know of is Google's Ouya which is android based. Unity can port to the new Ouya already, the marketplace will support Unity projects from indies and it should be about $100 to post, the Unity license should be $400 for the "Android" add on. These are not certain numbers contact Unity and Google directly for more information.

Dan Mayor

Professional Programmer & Hobbyist Game Developer

Seeking team for indie development opportunities, see my classifieds post