Game engine for beginners, details here...

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15 comments, last by RLS0812 9 years, 9 months ago

Ok fine, lets say C# is the best overall in performance & learning.

I have tried making my game in Unity and it has NOT gone well, i got VERY frustrated over it due to lack of community support.

Many have stated that I start in baby steps, so I did, i done one of the Unity tutorial series (Stealth) and of all the tutorials i have found, none have explained a piece of code in detail. This is what i have EXPERIENCED.

Unity has some of the best community support of any of the engines or frameworks that I have used. It has tons of tutorials and videos on youtube and around the web. I don't know if you didn't search hard enough or what but there is a ton of info and learning material on unity out there.

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Unity tutorials aren't there to teach you how to code buddy - there's a million and one other tutorials that teach you how to code as well as a bottomless pit of books.

Unity is an engine. It is NOT a language or an IDE, therefore the tutorials will rarely teach you how to code. If you want to learn the language(s), look elsewhere. Some tutorials may briefly mention what a piece of code does and why the tutor wrote it that way, but don't expect it as the norm.

Unity is also one of the best supported engines going. The community support is fantastic, tutorials are in abundance and there're many forums you can ask for help on.

I'd only end up repeating what others have said, so to summarise - don't blame the engine for your own pitfalls as a programmer.

BSc Computer Games Programming (De Montfort University) Graduate

Worked on Angry Birds Go! at Exient Ltd

Co-founder of Stormburst Studios

I started programming in VB all the way back with VB3, I thought C# was too difficult also, but what I learned was you just need to get the Syntax difference mastered and it's a much more robust language to work with. As far as Unity goes, I don't know where your looking but I have found almost 40GB worth of Video Tutorials, 20GB of assets sources, and a ton of other helpful tidbits; along with 4 different books which start you at the beginning. To me the most difficult part of Unity is getting a hang of its GUI. go to www.BergZergArcade.com and you can download an entire Hack-N-Slash RPG Game Tutorial, last I checked it like 280 videos and stats you from scratch.

Thing is, what other users are saying to you is right, is better to use other language than VB for games; but certainly nobody is responding what you are asking.

So here are some realistic options to develop your game:

  1. So, you want to make a game. Well, you don't have to reinvent the wheel... use a game engine with IDE like GameDevelop (compilgames.net) it's free (and became open source just today so it will be free forever), intuitive, and you don't need to write a single line of code to make a game like a 2D pokemon RPG with this software.
  2. Ok, so you want to code your game. Use Lua+Löve. Lua is a general purpose programming language that's popular around the indie gaming community, if you can understand and write VB code you can understand and write Lua code after reading a short tutorial in 20 minutes. Lua is extremely easy to learn and Löve (love2d.org) is an extremely easy to use 2D game framework to write games in Lua (btw, Lua+Löve = free).
  3. Ok, so you want to stay with VB. Well, first you have to choose if you want to use vbclassic or one of its forks, or the latest vb.net iteration. Next step, go to this page: vbgamer.com and take a month reading tutorials before writing a single post. From here you have more options: you can choose a 2D game engine (like Allegro [allegro.cc], for example... it's intended for C++ but you can use it with .NET languages) to work with VB or you can do what I did more than ten years ago: learn to bypass bitblt processing in VB moving blocks of memory with address pointers synchronized to the internal CPU tick counter (in fact, that's useless to make a game in a short amount of time but you can get a lot of learning on how to make games in a language like VB, specially for when you start to wonder why the FPS ratio are a mess).

And now, some 2D oriented FREE game engines that work with VB:

There are lots more, specially if you search for open source projects in sourceforge.com or github.com...

... and nope, I just don't want to list the features of each game engine, sorry and good luck wink.png

Have you try Gamesalad? It's free and unlimited resource! Eh, almost forget. What platform are you making? Is it mobile or PC? Because Gamesalad Free only support iOS (and the pro only support Mac ;( )

Sorry, if I do something wrong (in english, rude maybe, or... or... whatever!) or mistaken something! I just, uh you know, learning!


If so, I have a nice plot of land to sell you.

Everything I tried to convey in a few paragraphs you managed in one line. Hats off to you, L. Spiro! You gave me a laugh and allowed me to delete my rant and post a kudos to you instead!

Indie games are what indie movies were in the early 90s -- half-baked, poorly executed wastes of time that will quickly fall out of fashion. Now go make Minecraft with wizards and watch the dozen or so remakes of Reservior Dogs.

Unity is not accepted because it dosnt support VB as a language, last i checked it only accepts, C#, UnityScript (Javascript) & Boo

I have been told that the following languages are not a good starting point, hence why I only want VB

If you really like the language structure of BASIC ... Alice is all I can think of.

Unfortunately you will have expand your programming knowledge beyond BASIC if you wish to use more than a very limited range of tools.

Python, C#, and JavaScript are not hard to learn, especially if you already know BASIC .

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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