Creating new games?

mjnurney

we live as we dream. Alone.
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Ive already asked questions about this before but what is your advice on doing the following..

Best - easiest language or creator for making..(amiga non aga)

A turn based war game
A turn based simulation / stock market or similar
Graphic adventure game
Side ways shoot em up?

Now I have Amos basic , grac ,blitz and others but no manuals or idea how to use them...

I have made games in inform7 - text only and I like it and will continue to use it but I'd like graphics...

And help and or links to manuals would be welcome :)
 
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@mj

my friend, what is your target platform?

this will go in some way as to focus the language you should learn

For anything 16/32bit (like Amiga's early PC's) I would sware by C/C++

I truly love C/C++ while its a high-level language you can use inline asm for REALLY fast routines, and yet use the high-level constructs for speed of implemention and prototyping =)
The real beauty of C is the fact its incredibly powerfull and for the most part platform independent, so what you write (system legal) on Windows can be transfered to say an Andriod platform
For anything 8bit to get the most you need Assembly/Machine Code
The thought of machine code and assemlby language is off-putting for most but its really not hard to lean ASM, it is labourious to master though. while you can sit their and write machine code on paper - its better to use an assembler so atleast you can use phonetics like (ret) instead of a hex value (E9) etc​
For today's 32/64bit PC
Well if either of those doesn't float your boat, then there is something called DarkBasic, While I might encourage you to take up C/C++, DarkBasic I think is really what you are seeking for your projects​

So dependent on your target hardware platform, it will play a considerable art in determining what is the best language to learn.


so lets look at the type of games you want to develop

A turn based war game
All the processing is based either during or between turns, this is not realtime so theres no direct correlation to needed speed. I have seen Basic language project able to achieve a turn-based strategy like Battle Isle based on tiles.​
A turn based simulator / tycoon-esque
With the exception to on screen graphics, the calculations to the game are not done in real-time, thus theres no need for fast calcualtion, this could be realized in Basic, although like the above the graphics you wish to include may require a little more than Basic can provide.​
A Graphic adventure game
There are a few online graphic adventure creators our there for various formats from 8bit to 32bit, personally I believe that you could write this in a easy-to-learn basic, as again theres not that much processing at the base level, obviously if you want animations and it dungeon crawler esque then you will need to learn a more powerfull programming language like C/C++​
Side ways shoot em up
So here is were we seperate the men from the mice, to start off with have a look at the various "shoot'em up construction kits", theres plenty about to have a look at and this will give you an over-view as to what is involved in a 2D shooter, if you wanted to write your own stand-alone, then I would suggest the minimum you should learn is C/C++ (have you noticed that I keep comming back to C/C++?)​


One of the awesome parts of C/C++ is that there is a HUGE wealth of knowledge and help out there, with forums dedicated to setups/formats and all-sorts. There are code snippets to be used for Disk/IO handling, Graphics, sprites, even open source dungeon crawler code.

I would say that if you are willing to spend time learning a language, then C/C++ should be the one you take up, theres thousands of tutorials online, oodles of free resources and how-to guides with setups ready to download.
 
The platform I'm aiming for at the min is the Amiga 500 , I'm not too interested in pc / Mac or anything else as they have tons of stuff . I'd like to give a little bit back to the Amiga as it's been a friend to me and continues to amaze me after all these years.

I've only played with c many years ago and I didn't know what the hell I was doing ha ha - not so diffent to now really.

Ideally id like to write in Amos pro or blitz or whatever has the most versatile base and documentation...

I have no affection for the pc to be honest. The pc has always been a let down for me , well windows has.

Thanks zetr0 :)
 
Hi,

To add, if it's the A500 you are interested in and you don't really have a great deal of programming experience, then AMOS or AMOS Pro should be great for you. Both will run fine on an A500 although I do recommend that if you are using original hardware then you need a HDD.

The manuals are available online as PDF files and if you have troubles finding them let me know and I will find the download links for you. There are also heaps of sample games floating around as well as language extensions.

Cheers

Mark
 
For a first time developer I would not recommend c/c++ for writing games.

As zetro said it is super powerful, however it is your responsibility to code absolutely everything. Animation, scrolling, joystick or keyboard input, collision detection, load/save functions, etc are all up to you to write from scratch. Sure you can find example code for all of it and there are also third party libraries to help with most of it. But example code is just that, an example. You will need to re-work the code to fit your project needs. That's not going to be an easy task for a first timer.

The nice thing about amos and other basic's are that they come with libraries for doing just about everything you want to do in your games. Use those libraries, learn how to structure your apps and write good code. Then when you out grow the capabilities of the language your using and it's libraries, move to c/c++.

Once you understand the fundamentals of how to structure an application's code, the language becomes nothing more than a change in syntax.
 
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