The "Scroller game creator"?

[cave hermit]

So I've been interested in making my own STG's for a pretty long time now, but I have virtually no coding knowledge, nor do I have the time to learn how to code due to college.

However I found this program called the Scroller Game Creator from this company called silent works
http://www.silentworks.hu/sgc/

It claims to require no programming knowledge, claims to have a minimal learning curve, and is completely free (apparently they used to charge money for it, but they decided to just have a donation box instead).

However I can't seem to find any kind of information on "Silent works" (besides the fact that they apparently specialize in game making programs), and the only video footage I can find on youtube is a series of random tutorials from a channel that specializes in indie short films.

Has anybody here tried this before?

[BPzeBanshee]

Never heard of it. The weird photoshopped screenshots that don't actually show any details and this part:

- Supported sound formats: WAV, MP3

bother me significantly however for the reason being that WAV is obviously going to cause huge filesize for anything longer than a few seconds (aka most music) and the MP3 codec adds silence for the first 0.5 seconds of anything saved in that format thus breaking any attempt to loop music with it.

There's another creator like this being worked on in this very forum that's probably going to be more effective than this by suny, although the last time I did any searching around I found the more programming you learn the more control you have over things.

[suny]

There's another creator like this being worked on in this very forum that's probably going to be more effective than this by suny, although the last time I did any searching around I found the more programming you learn the more control you have over things.

I completely agree
Nothing will beat coding or scripting. You can't do a really, really original and personal work if you don't have control over EVERYTHING.
Some people don't have time, or are not interested to learn code, though. This is the goal of the SHMUP Creator: to allow people who don't want to/can't code to have fun.
S.

[cave hermit]

Well, this program is crap.

-The level editor has a vertical scroll bar that can only be moved at a painfully slow rate by using the mouse wheel (and it's a really long scroll bar!), making it a tedious marathon just to view a specific part of the level
-Many of the options have extremely vague descriptions that don't explain what they do (i.e: there's an option to set the "scroll border" to a number, with no explanation of what a scroll border is, or what changing the number does)
-The background has to be a fixed static image small enough to fit in a single screen
-Enemies can only be programed to either move in one of the four cardinal directions without change, or follow the player
-There are no dedicated boss options meaning you can't program the level to stop advancing when a boss appears, you can't have a boss BGM, and you can't program the level to complete when the boss is killed
-You get a very small range of generic fonts (including comic sans)
-There's no option to preview the game in action, meaning if you want to test your game you have to build the executable
-There is no documentation besides a text file in the directory listing a few hotkeys
-The GUI looks bizarrely unprofessional, like it was MS painted
-The in program option to view "SGC news" just opens a generic domain for sale website.

These are just the problems off the top of my head: I'm sure there are many more.

So yeah, I'll just wait for suny's STG maker.

[suny]

I was aware of this tool, but didn't have the time to try it.
So, I'm relieved that it's crap

Thanks for the review.
S.

[BPzeBanshee]

Yeah, it's always good to have this sort of review info in Development for smaller dev programs. If anyone else asks about this thing we can just point here. Thanks cave hermit for being the guinea pig on this one, and let us know if you happen to find anything else worth looking into in the meantime.