And which are the projects out there that are making the most interesting/commendable efforts to deliver that ease?
Well, Game Maker for 2d games and Unity for 3d games. I havenāt used either myself, but those seem to scale well from small prototypes to full-scale games made by a team over a couple of years.
Itās a good question if things will get even easier from now on. My sense is that at todayās high level of ease, the improvements will only be marginal going forward. I donāt see a revolutionarily easy new way of programming or making art on the horizon. Modding existing games could be a lot easier still though, in theory that should be trivial in comparison to building a game from scratch, but today itās not.
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Yeah, Unityās really easy. Some people find Unreal a bit friendlier, but the logo is ugly, soā
You can make a game with not much programming at all, and itās easy enough to nick little functions and things by searching online. You could make a walkaround game with no programming at all.
There are also really easy things with much narrower focuses, like Flickgame, Twine, Puzzlescript, Vertex Meadow, Kooltoolā
Iāve just started using a 3-D modeling program thatās really simple called Crocodile3D. Easy for building and texturing things, but thereās no animation. Iām not aware of any simple animation tools for 3-D.
Are you keen on making stuffs, or just curious about where things are?
Iām actually working on a wiki focused on game making tools and helping them be useful for amateur game makeers, but itās not populated enough to be public yet.
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Just taking the temperature really
itās only taken me a tiny bit of research to be able to make a bunch of the kinds of things I want to make in terms of 2d games with game maker, but I think something like game maker with a rock-solid collision system would be a pretty significant step forward in easy 2d game development.
Once the mechanics of programming a game is made easier, isnāt it actually making game development much harder in the long run, since it raises the expectations on whatās achievable?
Iām pondering this, operating on the assumption that even with a perfect, mythical brain-to-product workflow, you still have to coordinate more distinct disciplines than any other medium going
Can you tell us more about crocodile? Iām working in magicavoxel to do boxers, but I also want to learn low poly 3D
Well probably the best thing to do it just grab it off itch.io (itās free if you donāt want to save/export).
It works kinda backwards, in that you mostly draw your textures first, then model with those like theyāre ātilesā (as youād have in a 2-D spritesheet, or something).
Itās pretty quick for placing quads and dragging round points, and itās all quad-by-quad, rather than point-by-point or messing with primitives.
Exports to .OBJ and works nice in Unity.
You can also paint your texture in the editor, but itās mostly only good for simple stuff. Apparantly you can sync your texture file so you can be editing it in Gimp at the same time or whatever too.
As a learning tool maybe in a way itās not good because itās pretty different to other programs, but probably good as a way of getting a grip on how to use polygons carefully.
Itch.io pageās here: http://prominent.itch.io/crocotile3d maybe check out the video to explain things better
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I think brain-to-product sounds really sad.
I imagine a lot of people wouldnāt make stuff if making stuff didnāt involve making stuff.
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On the other hand, I think a lot of people arenāt making stuff because it involves making stuff.
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Thatās because the making is the inventing. Those thoughts arenāt really there until theyāre guided by the creating
no brain-to-brain communication thx
messing around with Superpowers, I have a tiny cute witch sprite on the screen and it moves around :mission accomplished:
There is a dude with a procedural generation blog (made the voxel engine that ended up as the tech behind Everquest Next and Landmark) that thinks that eventually an entire state of the art game could be generated procedurally. As in not just the assets but also the game logic, ruleset and that kind of stuff.
Iām like, dude we havenāt even codified how to make a good game ourselves as intelligent humans (assuming thatās even possible). How do you plan to teach a computer to do so?
Still, he remained adamant that this will be achieved within our lifetimes. Huh.
Yes, thatās far more likely.
Still, I donāt quite see what purpose such a tool would have for the medium, other than as a neat toy to play around with?
Some people look at the fundamental rules of the universe and marvel at their simplicity & the richness of behaviour and appearance they produce, and imagine that we could simulate a subset of it on a computer.
This sounds a little like the Left4Dead Director, or the Shadows over Mordor Nemesis system.
Those two are a bit more purposeful than what I had in mind with that game-generator program, but yeah, itās similar in nature.
Stuff like that is what I want current-gen development to explore further. I hope L4D3 goes wild in this direction.
this doesnāt solve the ācodifying good gamesā problem but itās a very small step forward for procedural generation of entire games: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/papers/browne_cig11.pdf
itās pretty dense and full of maths but basically the two authors created a system that acts as almost a markup language for defining game rules and then perform various operations on those game rules using selection criteria to filter out games that donāt work over tons of iterations.
the problem with generating games this way (and procedural generation in general, honestly) is those initial assumptions ā in order to build a system that can even be iterated over and selected for, the authors of the paper put some pretty harsh constraints on what constitutes a ālegalā game, and the games that are created arenāt interesting in any modern sense
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A million monkeys and a million typewriters. Defining what a legal game is going to be a problem. Then figuring out how to identify that is going to be a problem. And then finally curating games that any normal person is going to want to play is going to be amazingly difficult.
The one thing that is going to make game dev easier now is access to assets. Thatās why every gamedev platform has an asset store. Hopefully one day weāll be OK with people using other peopleās props in their games. Maybe weāll find another Wilhelm screamā¦