What are people messing around with?

I'm playing around with Slick, a 2D Java game library based on LWJGL. Working a simple Tower Defense Game, so far so good.

Scirra.com, try Construct 1 (free and open source). Make 2D direct X games in an event based system, and then you can expand on this and use Python and C++ to add on to it if you wish at a later date.

Just to let you know I'm involved with the site and involved with the commercialisation of Construct 2 so if this is more of an advert then mods feel free to delete it!

http://www.allegro.cc/

Not used it, but it seems to be quite popular based on the number of games listed on the site written using it.

Juk

Wow, some of these look pretty cool / sophisticated. I'm still in the mindset of writing my little hobby games from scratch because that's how I learned to do it when I started out in high school, back in the glorious nineties!

But using these prefab starter apps does seem to make good sense for certain kinds of small-scale, personal projects or experiments.

Related question: where do people go to find artists that don't flake out?

I'm working on an oldschool 2d point and click adventure right now. Always wanted to write one, mainly to get used to Pygame.
My graphics are...placeholders...erm..yeah...ugly

My first milestone is having one scene with working user interface and some puzzle to get out of the room. When that's done I'll look at getting some art for said room and all items and the player, mainly to get me motivated to actually write the story and get the rest done

I'd also be interested in resonable price ranges for background graphics, player/NPC animations etc (all 2D). My guess is that the better you pay, the more likely you can get someone to get all stuff done

You mean you guys find other people to do the drawings and graphics for you?! I thought that was half the fun!

I'm colorblind and barely manage to draw stickmen. 0 fun at all for me eventhough I hate it that I'm totally design/graphics inapt

LOL, I once spent about 2 days trying to draw a chess knight and it still looked like a snake with ears at the end Some of us are just not blessed with the ability to draw stuff lol.

Juk

That reminds me of a funny story I read about drawing chess pieces. Back in the days of battle chess:



One of the artists was fed up of drawing a piece and then having management love it, but have to look like they are having some influence on the artwork so ask him to change something. He found it really irritating.

So he was drawing the Queen, made it looks beautiful, then he added a duck at her foot. It didn't overlap any of the animation, it was essentially separate from the queen piece. He showed it to management and they say "Love the queen, but remove the duck!"

Unity is pretty nice for quickly putting together game ideas. You can go from brand new idea to web deployment in a matter of hours. The scripting language is similar to C# and pretty intuitive.

XNA is also pretty fun to play with, since you can deploy you games on your Xbox 360 and play them (that part requires a ~$100 yearly fee, though, iirc). Another C#/.net based situation.

Gimp is just too challenging for my attention span, seriously. I give up with graphics stuff after the first sketch which I don't like. And I never like the first sketch.
Pixels are narcissistic egomaniacs.

I think vendor graphics are very aesthetic tho.

Grey shades is all the colors one needs to build a GUI.

I guess technically I'm not doing a pure hobby project at the moment, but rather would like it to sell well on the App Store.

So yeah I want actual art talent involved.

Neil is that still related to the game I bought from you a while back (for OSX) or an entirely different one. Dunno if you want to out info etc.

This is all new. My biggest client is going into a lull of needing my services, so I'm plotting releasing a board game.

Unfortunately I gave up on that game after months of zero sales, though sometimes I wonder if I should give it a go, updating it and putting it on the Mac App Store.

Just read through the documentation for sqlalchemy and build a helper python file that creates an sqlite database of the items for my game

I used to read them from a .txt file with a selfinvented storing convention...time to test how good my OOP-abstraction was and hopefully just swap out the "loadItems" logic in the Scene class and replace it with sqlalchemy stuff for reading from the database

Works...I can now do the following:

1) Create a Scene object and draw it (i.e. blit a background image), Create a Player and Inventory object and load their look (i.e. blit an image representing them onto the scene)
2) Load all Items for the scene from an SQLite database and blit them onto the scene at the locations specified in the DB
3) Change the mouse logic by cycling through actions on rightclick (walk, take, look etc), no change of mousecursor yet though
4) Walk the player around by teleporting him to the loation of the mouseclick if the mouseaction is set to walk (i.e. no animation in place yet) and some basic collision detection
5) Show the name of the items if the mouse hovers over them (currently using the system font, will eventually be a custom one but still looks nice)
6) Output of current action and what is clicked on i.e. a rudimentary acrtion handler
7) If an item is takeable, if action is set to take and the item is leftclicked, put it into the inventory (inventory has slots, it'll be put in the first available one) and remove it from the scene
8) Quit the game

Also have a helper file that builds the item DB from a python script (easier to make changes that way imo)

Next on the TODO list:
- Change cursor to corresponding action (I'll make the cursor invisible and replace it with a graphic)
- Create some icon graphics for items for the inventory
- Change the inventory to basically be a black bar at the bottom that only shows up if the mouse is hovered over it and also implement a next page button if it's full

That's all fairly small stuff (I hope) and will conclude the first prototype after which I'll refactor/redesign some stuff; clean up the code, write better comments/docstrings and write tests. I'll probably make a design thread for this.

I've worked a lot with XNA and Blender. Cool stuff.

I spent about 3 years writing a chess engine in C# that ran on the Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com)

I've had a couple of really fun clients, a NFL team and a racing league (look at my location and you're the winner)

Any advice on where to find free/cheap 3d models and animations for playing around with on Unity3d?

Refactored into cleaner OOP, using images instead of placeholder Rect. Next refactor step: change all WorldObjects to inherit from Sprite...currently they are basically selfmade Sprites with a look and shape attribute so basically those should only be changed to image and rect and presto

Also using git for the project to get used to git

If people get sick and tired of my random updates, let me know :P

* Changed the code to use Sprites for all drawable objects and Groups (containers for Sprites)
* Remade the inventory (hoverover effect still to be done)
* Items are now "iconified" when they are taken and the corresponding icon shows up in the inventory
* Random refacotring/better names etc.
* Introduced a bug: items and the player are not removed from the scene before they are redrawn...should be easy to fix but I'll sleep now and fixing it means rereading the Sprite/Groups documentation which I can't concentrate now

Maybe I'll post a screenshot once the bug is fixed

Fixed the bug and added a background music to the scene

Next up:
- mouse cursor graphics (and making the cursor invisibel)
- inventory only shows up if you hover over it
- improve collision detection
- player animation (and pathfinding)

Check out TurboSquid. The Unity asset store also has models (some free). It's accessible from within the Unity editor.

My 11 year-old daughter is very smart and cpu-savvy and wants to develop a simple game made with characters she invented. She messed around with one program but I can't recall the name, but it wasn't a good fit.

Is there anything out there that might fit what she is looking for, i.e. you don't have to be a pro to use it?