Creating a shmups - few questions

[siemien]

Hello everyone! I've been playing shmups for a long time and few years ago I thought about making a shmups, but the idea went off, now I'm back with it. What should I learn? What language? In what program I should make it to be universal for PC/Linux? Unity or maybe there is something better? I'm seeking for advice. I know that it will be a long road without knowing any programming language other than HTML and my skills at pixel art aren't the best, but I want to make something for myself. Please help me out

[Shepardus]

Unity would work though in my opinion it's a bit overkill for most shmup projects. Game Maker Studio might be a good choice; it's relatively simple to get started with but still powerful enough to make impressive games like Final Boss.

[Squire Grooktook]

There's nothing overkill about Unity: it has lots of options tailored to make 2d or sprite based game creation easy.

GMOSSE is definitely easiest though since a lot of the important stuff and framework is already set up perfectly.

[siemien]

I'm wondering about this Unity vs Game Maker. I can tell that Unity requires to learn programming language like C# or some other. But what about Game Maker?

[Shepardus]

Unity lets you use either C# or JavaScript for scripting. Game Maker technically doesn't require you to learn a programming language, but if you plan on doing anything substantial you should be making use of its programming language, GML, as managing complex logic through the drag and drop interface gets unwieldy quickly. I don't have enough experience with either to say which one's easier to pick up, but I wouldn't let either's programming throw you off from creating a game. Neither Game Maker nor Unity make you do very low-level programming stuff, so at its core the programming is simply describing how the game behaves, which you're going to have to do no matter what, whether they call it programming or not.

[siemien]

I setlled for C#/Unity and some Pixel Art (still a super beginner with this) in Gimp I'll I manage to create anything I'll post my WIP threat

[trap15]

I recommend not using GIMP for pixel art. It's really really bad at it. Go get a real pixel art tool instead (graphicsgale, pro motion, etc)

[Rozyrg]

I would recommend GIMP; but it could be just that I'm used to it's quirks - hell, I used to use vanilla MS Paint for the same purposes. I have to use something else for animation, though (GM8's handy little sprite editor in this case), so maybe not if you need that functionality built right in.

@trap15 do any of those do fullscreen animation ala Deluxe Paint? I always loved that feature.

[rfeese]

I've been using Gimp. It maybe has slowed me down at times, but it is useable. The worst problems I have with it are: I haven't found a good way to preview an animation, and exporting graphics is tedious and time consuming. There is an animation plugin that can help with animation but it doesn't work as well as I would like. I suspect there are solutions if I spent the time to dig deeper or do some custom scripting. Gimp has a good layer system that you need to learn to use and become adept with. One other piece of advice I have is to get a good palette from somewhere to start with. I rolled my own without knowing much about it at the time I started. Another thing that probably would have helped me in general would be to try to develop art in grayscale and then add color. I have tried this a few times and it helped. It may not help as much if you have a good palette and are good at colors. I am partially color blind so colors are a struggle for me.

[siemien]

So what you suggest for pixel art? Some people on youtube use Photoshop, but the new one is expensive, but the older one like CS2-3 are not that bad. Also I found a program called Piskel (not Piksel, it's Piskel) on website and also offline version.

Also what resolution is ideal for horizontal and vertical shooter? Vertical (the ship moves up and down 320x240) and Horizontal (ship left to right 240x320)? If I'm not correct than please help me

[BPzeBanshee]

Also what resolution is ideal for horizontal and vertical shooter? Vertical (the ship moves up and down 320x240) and Horizontal (ship left to right 240x320)? If I'm not correct than please help me

Matter of opinion mostly but I advocate for 320x240 (or flip those for verticals) as the base resolution to use for your game, since that's perfect aspect ratio for TVs and being low-res in most cases will lead to better performance.

On the subject of editors and IDEs, neat thing about Game Maker is that it has its own editor, but you can specify external editors or just make something in an external editor and then import. I'm neutral on GIMP, trap15 isn't wrong considering it isn't really *meant* for low-res material but it is malleable enough for some parts, iirc Kaiser uses it to great effect. I hear good things about Paint.NET these days though, perhaps that's worth looking into?

[Herr Schatten]

So what you suggest for pixel art?

Pro Motion is fantastic, I cannot recommend it enough. It's not free, but it brings everything you need for drawing (and animating) pixel art.

[suny]

Pro Motion is made for pixel art, as it's strongly inspired from Deluxe Paint from the amiga days.
It's a great piece of software.
S.

[ptoing]

@trap15 do any of those do fullscreen animation ala Deluxe Paint? I always loved that feature.

ProMotion does. It is inspired heavily by DPaint.

[siemien]

Can I use C++ in Unity?

[Squire Grooktook]

^^^No, but if you know the basics of C++ you can use the basics of C# in Unity. I started working with Unity after my first C++ course and didn't take a C# course till after I had done a ton in it.

[siemien]

Ok. I used some pixelart software, including Piskel that I mentioned. I made a simple 32x32 sprite and placed it in 240x320 enviroment. I don't know if it's not to big. This sprite is a player's ship. I wanted to ask how large should player sprite be and small round bullets pixels etc? I mean 32x32 for a player is not to big and probably enough, but for small round bullets I would go for 16x16? What do you think?

[BPzeBanshee]

I do 32x32 sprites myself so that sounds right to me, but you got a bit of leeway on this as long as it fits in with the style of the game and keeps it playable.

For bullet sizes 16x16 isn't too bad either but mix it up - some bullets could be 8x8, 16x4 (for long bullet shapes), etc.

[Mr Halibut]

When you're trying to figure out what size is 'normal' for things like ships, bullets, enemies etc., try taking screen grabs from MAME and see how other games do it. Just press F12 to take a snapshot, it will show up in the mame/snap folder. You need to check that it's a game that runs in a similar resolution, it will display this on the splash screen when you start the game from MAME.

For 320x240 res, 32x32 is fairly typical for a player ship. Smaller bullets may be more like 8x8.

[siemien]

First I need to learn C# on practical level to use it in Unity with some help of tutorials and meanwhile I'll make some not very good and refined sprites for testing:)

[siemien]

Hello It's been a while seen I posted this thread any my C# are close to none, but C++ skills are a bit higher. I was watching WIP threats and remembered that I wanted to use SDL and it can be used with C++. What do you think? It's a good lib to use with shmups and overall sprite based games?