Making a good scrolling SHMUP in Multimedia Fusion 2

[DrBlowhole20]

Hey guys, i am DrBlowhole20, AKA SkipperThePenguin100 from deviantart, i would ask a question, i can't make a good SHMUP like Gradius, i've made several times doing games with the genre, but they're really boring, is there a good engine like Gradius for Multimedia Fusion 2?

[n0rtygames]

Hey guys, i am DrBlowhole20, AKA SkipperThePenguin100 from deviantart, i would ask a question, i can't make a good SHMUP like Gradius, i've made several times doing games with the genre, but they're really boring, is there a good engine like Gradius for Multimedia Fusion 2?

Hello,

Glad to see you're trying your hand at making shmups. There's not really an engine for making a game like Gradius. Gradius is the product of several years of work and extensive testing from a large team of people with enough financial backing and support to let it be seen on high profile consoles. It's a high quality product and you shouldn't allow yourself to be disheartened because your games are lesser quality.

If I could give you some better advice - since from the tone of your post it looks like you're looking for something easier to get to grips with than low level programming - I would suggest you look at XNA/C# to do a Windows game. Follow some tutorials and get things moving around... or... you could look at using Game Maker. A lot of folk here use Game Maker and have made some good games!

I know this isn't the post you were looking for - but I can't really offer any advice on Multimedia Fusion 2 I'm afraid. If you're looking to eventually make a quality scrolling shooter, I'd look at moving to something a bit more suited for creation of games. Just my opinion..

[BPzeBanshee]

I had a go at Multimedia Fusion 2 once and I found it quite difficult to use, even to get a ship to move without some form of inertia. I got the impression quite quickly I'd be fighting the interface a lot more than I should. Seconding the suggestion for Game Maker - plenty of tutorials around, you'll get results very quickly and contrary to about 2 pooper-people in Development there's quite a bit of room for improvement for it.

If I could give you some better advice - since from the tone of your post it looks like you're looking for something easier to get to grips with than low level programming - I would suggest you look at XNA/C# to do a Windows game.

C# *isn't* low-level now? That's news to me.

[Shmuppet]

I liked Game Maker, but for complex and involved projects it was MUCH too complicated and cumbersome.

I recommend Blitzmax for PC shoot 'em up development(guess I'm alone on that one LOL). It's very easy to develop pure 2D games with. The language is very easy to pick up and you can rapid prototype without having to fight the interface. I made a functioning(programmer art, no frills) scrolling shmup in an hour, and that's without OOP. You can even make general apps with it, using custom GUIs. While it will take some elbow grease, almost anything is possible with Blitzmax(and it's cross-platform!). It's also lightweight and handles on-screen action pretty well(when I develop my games, my PC sees slight FPS dips after 1400 object instances appear on the screen). I tried a decent GM game, and it STILL slows down on my Dell Inspiron 15R! My specs aren't THAT bad. O_O

The only real drawback is the price(and some argue the lack of GPU support) - however, you can bypass the trial limitations with frequent HDD wipes(and use openGL for any 3D stuff). I bought it though, and it's the best investment I ever made. AFAIC, GameMaker can go die in a hole.

[mice]

We should set up a thread with frameworks / platforms pros and cons for shmups (and general development).
Yes?

[n0rtygames]

C# *isn't* low-level now? That's news to me.

Good grief no. C# is a very high level language and extremely easy to work with. It's practically Java with more of a C look about it.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well, cheers for the heads-up n0rty. I've been getting the wrong impression this whole time.

We should set up a thread with frameworks / platforms pros and cons for shmups (and general development).
Yes?

I think an organised table of developer environments/frameworks could come in quite handy providing there's a specific focus on features, for example cross-platform export/compatibility. That way, it'll be easier to 'compare' for features while hopefully avoiding bias. Pros/cons could work but we've had a dozen conversations about pros/cons in various threads and I'm inclined to say it's been getting a bit too Shmups Chat behaviour for my liking. A feature-based approach should help to curb the amount of 'what engine do I use' threads that keep popping up here and maybe actually help newcomers get past the stage of figuring out their tool to use based on the benefits of said frameworks. Then, any competitive streak can come purely from updating info on the features list - for example n0rty can give heads-up on anything C#-related, etc.

I tried a decent GM game, and it STILL slows down on my Dell Inspiron 15R! My specs aren't THAT bad. O_O

I'm curious to know your specs and what precisely you define as a 'decent' GM game to cause slowdown (I tried looking up your laptop model and the manufacturer's website was a bit vague, "Intel Core" doesn't help narrow things down by much). There's a lot of stuff on Yoyogames (not on this forum, or I'd rip them to pieces) that will lag the crap out of most laptops thanks to unnecessary aesthetic 'improvements', so I hope it's not one of those.

[n0rtygames]

I think an organised table of developer environments/frameworks could come in quite handy providing there's a specific focus on features, for example cross-platform export/compatibility. That way, it'll be easier to 'compare' for features while hopefully avoiding bias.

You won't get an unbiased answer I'm afraid Banshee. The truth of the matter is unfortunately thus:

1. Is your artwork good enough to get you employed professionally? Congratulations, you're a game artist
2. Are you coding in a language that is used in the industry? Congratulations, you might get an interview as a coder
3. Are you producing in an environment where multi platform deployment is possibe? Congrats, you might make it as an "indie"
4. Are you producing in an environment which is supported by paid distribution platforms? Congrats, see 3.
5. None of the above? I hope this is just a hobby for you. If it is - use what you like. If it isn't - wake up and smell the caffeinated beverage.

Honestly, Game Maker could be the best thing ever - with more features than anyone has ever seen before. It could allow you to plug your brain in directly, imagine a game and see it happen moments later. But the sad truth is - until there's an industry shift towards using it or a large number of paid positions are hiring.. if anyone has aspirations of making games as a profession.. then it really has to be ruled out.

I know that's probably not a nice pill to swallow - I'm just trying to elaborate a little more and make it less 'shmups chat'

MommysBestGames/XonaGames/n0rtygames/Mice/Flump Studios/Fun Infused will pretty much all agree with the above - not because we're zealots - but because we're all looking to do this professionally long term and have to go where the market is.. sadly.


That's really the only thing it boils down to for me. Is it a professionally recognised language? Y/N? GameMaker could very well become a competitive product over time. But right now, it's not getting anyone a job unless they're an artist. (Good artists are hard to find - coders who can hack their way through a problem are everywhere)

[BPzeBanshee]

snip

So, to be clear then: You'd rather go by whether a IDE is commercially viable or not?

Really your post is the first thing in this thread to get me even thinking of the possibility of commercial viability as a yay or nay goer for an IDE. I've always seen it purely by platform and environment: if you wanna make stuff for the 360, XNA. Make stuff for PC, <PC based something here>. If having a marketplace is what you think is a factor than surely even that could be listed as a feature, albeit with a touch more elaboration than a tick or cross compared to Linux export for instance. I'm thinking something like:

R=Feature&C#&C++&BlitzMax&Construct Classic&Game Maker Studio&Random Shit I just came up with R=[b]Marketplace[/b]&Self&Self&???&???&Yoyo/Self&Self R=[b]Windows[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes R=[b]Mac OS X[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&Yes&No&No R=[b]Linux[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&???&Yes&No

Or the other way around so that the features are on top and the associated platforms are on the side.

[mystran]

I had a go at Multimedia Fusion 2 once and I found it quite difficult to use, even to get a ship to move without some form of inertia. I got the impression quite quickly I'd be fighting the interface a lot more than I should. Seconding the suggestion for Game Maker - plenty of tutorials around, you'll get results very quickly and contrary to about 2 pooper-people in Development there's quite a bit of room for improvement for it.

If I could give you some better advice - since from the tone of your post it looks like you're looking for something easier to get to grips with than low level programming - I would suggest you look at XNA/C# to do a Windows game.

C# *isn't* low-level now? That's news to me.

It's certainly quite low-level compared to something like Haskell. At the same time it's certainly fairly high-level compared to symbolic assembler. Things tend to be relative. C# is certainly a step up from C++ with stronger type-safety and automatic memory management being the most obvious (though you can use a GC with C++ too if you really want to, I've even used it a few times myself.. it works fine, with the usual trade-offs, naturally). I'm under the impression that much of the other cool stuff like the reflection facilities aren't really available in the compact profile (x360), but on Windows you get that stuff too.

Anyway, for someone that doesn't necessarily need a lot of abstractive power (in practice basic OOP concepts get you pretty far) it might be more helpful to consider whether you want a general purpose language or a domain specific language/environment, or something in between (eg general purpose language, but a ready-made engine of some sort). The more general the "language" (in the wide sense of the word), the less restrictions it'll place on you. At the same time, you normally end up having to implement more stuff yourself (which is really the point: you get to pick your own restrictions).

That said, for someone without programming background the above two paragraphs probably won't say much of anything, which likely makes me an old fool for writing them in the first place. Really it doesn't matter what you do and learn, much of it will carry over to other stuff anyway. If you want to learn programming, pick a programming language (ANY programming language, heck COBOL would work if you can find a compiler) and if you just want to get stuff done, pick an environment that has the features you need. The hard part in any case is keeping yourself motivated long enough to get something done.

Anyway, the OP says (literal quote) "i've made several times doing games with the genre, but they're really boring" and this is hardly a question that is solved by an engine or a language. If you can make a boring game, you can almost certainly make at least a prototype of something that's not boring. So instead of asking "what engine" you might want to ask "what is it that makes Gradius 'not boring' and why?" and expanding "what does Gradius make you feel as a player, how an why? What does it make you do, how and why?" Once you do that, you'll be asking more specific questions, and you'll be able to make much more educated choices as far as platforms and engines and languages go.

[n0rtygames]

Anyway, the OP says (literal quote) "i've made several times doing games with the genre, but they're really boring" and this is hardly a question that is solved by an engine or a language. If you can make a boring game, you can almost certainly make at least a prototype of something that's not boring. So instead of asking "what engine" you might want to ask "what is it that makes Gradius 'not boring' and why?" and expanding "what does Gradius make you feel as a player, how an why? What does it make you do, how and why?" Once you do that, you'll be asking more specific questions, and you'll be able to make much more educated choices as far as platforms and engines and languages go.

Yus, this is pretty much the first thing I said:

Glad to see you're trying your hand at making shmups. There's not really an engine for making a game like Gradius. Gradius is the product of several years of work and extensive testing from a large team of people with enough financial backing and support to let it be seen on high profile consoles. It's a high quality product and you shouldn't allow yourself to be disheartened because your games are lesser quality.

If I could give you some better advice - since from the tone of your post it looks like you're looking for something easier to get to grips with than low level programming...

[mystran]

Anyway, the OP says (literal quote) "i've made several times doing games with the genre, but they're really boring" and this is hardly a question that is solved by an engine or a language. If you can make a boring game, you can almost certainly make at least a prototype of something that's not boring. So instead of asking "what engine" you might want to ask "what is it that makes Gradius 'not boring' and why?" and expanding "what does Gradius make you feel as a player, how an why? What does it make you do, how and why?" Once you do that, you'll be asking more specific questions, and you'll be able to make much more educated choices as far as platforms and engines and languages go.

Yus, this is pretty much the first thing I said:

Glad to see you're trying your hand at making shmups. There's not really an engine for making a game like Gradius. Gradius is the product of several years of work and extensive testing from a large team of people with enough financial backing and support to let it be seen on high profile consoles. It's a high quality product and you shouldn't allow yourself to be disheartened because your games are lesser quality.

See, we agree that engines don't make games, but I argue that one might want to try to understand what goes inside the player head, then exploit that to make it less boring, while you argue that one should find financial backing to let it be seen on high profile consoles. Yes, I agree that you should get financial backing to get it on high profile consoles, but I would also argue that it doesn't necessarily make your game any less boring. YMMV.

I can't disagree with the part about "years of work" though; sadly everything takes time.

[Reiko]

Just to throw this out there, Really Big Sky ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45W_Eq9iomM ) was made using Multimedia Fusion.

That being said, people with low end pcs complained a lot about the game running horrible, and the developer had a hard time improving performance. Don't know if the problems were the developers fault or the engine's though. Perhaps a bit of both.

Anyway, never used it, and really know nothing about it actually, so I can't comment on it personally.

If you don't know a programming language to be able to code everything yourself, and instead want to use one of these game making tools, I would probably just check out what they're capable of, see whether you'd need those features in your game, find out what the tutorials/online support for that engine is like (are there large/good help forums?), and go from there. Don't worry too much about what engine makes stuff the "prettiest", since that's often the product of a skilled artist rather than a good engine.

Sadly I can't recommend you one though. I started programming when I was 6, so I kinda always had the programming language knowledge, and the times I've been fiddling around with gaming, I've used game/graphics libraries, rather than a game making tool per se. Well aside from RPG Maker, which is specialised and of no help here. As Norty has said, several people here have gotten along ok with Game Maker though.

[Shmuppet]

snip

So, to be clear then: You'd rather go by whether a IDE is commercially viable or not?

Really your post is the first thing in this thread to get me even thinking of the possibility of commercial viability as a yay or nay goer for an IDE. I've always seen it purely by platform and environment: if you wanna make stuff for the 360, XNA. Make stuff for PC, <PC based something here>. If having a marketplace is what you think is a factor than surely even that could be listed as a feature, albeit with a touch more elaboration than a tick or cross compared to Linux export for instance. I'm thinking something like:

R=Feature&C#&C++&BlitzMax&Construct Classic&Game Maker Studio&Random Shit I just came up with R=[b]Marketplace[/b]&Self&Self&???&???&Yoyo/Self&Self R=[b]Windows[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes R=[b]Mac OS X[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&Yes&No&No R=[b]Linux[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&???&Yes&No

Or the other way around so that the features are on top and the associated platforms are on the side.

That sounds like a fantastic idea! Somebody should get to that... I'm kind of biased to C# too, if only for the easy access to HLSL. But you can always list stuff without bias.

[trap15]

Everything sucks but native code.

Write your own engine.

Cry manly tears of joy when you have a player shooting a bullet and killing an enemy.

[Dave_K.]

...snip...

table updated, kthanksbye!

R=Feature&C#&C++&BlitzMax&Construct Classic&Game Maker Studio&Random Shit&Flash/AS3 R=[b]Marketplace[/b]&Self&Self&???&???&Yoyo/Self&Self&Many R=[b]Windows[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes R=[b]Mac OS X[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&Yes&No&No&Yes R=[b]Linux[/b]&Yes&Yes&???&???&Yes&No&Yes

[nasty_wolverine]

Everything sucks but native code.
Write your own engine.

Nothing like hand crafting your own engine to do exactly what you want...
And i swear by native code, there are lots of ways to make code portable, without rewriting much between each platform.
(hint: use C/C++ with Opengl, and a crossplatform boilerplate code library like SDL/SFML/GLFW)

Cry manly tears of joy when you have a player shooting a bullet and killing an enemy.

Exactly how i felt when i had a simple working prototype, just one player, one enemy, bunch of bullets

[BPzeBanshee]

...snip...

table updated, kthanksbye!

Forgot about Flash/AS3! Cheers!

Cutting Random Shit out, GM:Studio has modules for OSX by default in one of their packs, and Linux module recently got added, so the blanks left are as follows:
R=Feature&C#&C++&BlitzMax&Construct Classic&Game Maker Studio&Flash/AS3 R=[b]Marketplace[/b]&Self&Self&???&???&Many&Many R=[b]Windows[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes R=[b]Mac OS X[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes&Yes R=[b]Linux[/b]&Yes&Yes&Yes&???&Yes&Yes

I think we need better definitions of Marketplace availability though. Some of these obviously don't have contained marketplaces available by the engine creators while some do, and some like Flash have kajillions of third-party websites ready to snatch it up. Maybe some actual places other than 'handling it all yourself' could be specified, like in Flash's case 'third-party websites'? Maybe just 'Many' covers it if there's multiple websites (GameJolt supports anything Windows-based IIRC).

[Shmuppet]

Man, I ain't NEVER doing just C++ EVER AGAIN(unless it's for console lol). I started with Allegro, and you know shit's wrong when someone makes an easy IDE of an already easy-to-use library! I never ran into so many damn compiler errors in a stable app. That's why I went to Blitzmax/GM/RPG Maker, at least you didn't have to worry about your apps not working between stable builds for no reason.

[trap15]

[Temia Eszteri]

Everything sucks but native code.

Write your own engine.

Cry manly tears of joy when you have a player shooting a bullet and killing an enemy.

Yeah, that's about how I felt on my own personal project lately. Writing your own framework from the ground up may give you the most power, but you will usually be about ready to jump off a bridge (or close to giving up and move to a new project) by the time you have your framework code written enough to get to the actual meat of your game... at which point, yes, the elation of being able to see your ideas coming to life as soon as you do get to write the meat of your game is overwhelming.

If you're not in it to learn the language itself and some general programming concepts as well as make a game, stick to an existing framework.

[Shmuppet]

Learning C/C++ definitely helped in my game development skills. However, if faced with commercial shareware game development on the PC, I will opt for something like Blitzmax/GameMaker. So the language served its purpose for me, I no longer need it.

It's all about choosing your goals, and deciding whether or not to meet them all at once or one at a time.