Last week I decided once and for all that I’m going to get into game development. I have a lot to learn, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a real fun thing to get into and I’m nearing the point where I have the skills to do it. My main problem is my art skills are lacking quite a bit at the moment. I’m concentrating on sprite creation for 2D games and modeling/texturing for 3D games. Monday of last week (April 8, 2013) I found out about Unity3D. I fell in love with it. Up until this point, I’ve been working with Java to make mini-games, as a learning experience, but I don’t really like mucking about with setting up Java. I dislike working with class paths, and I don’t particularly care for the distribution side of software that is created with Java. I may still venture into that but I want to turn out some actual games first.
Unity3D allows you to create your games in a GUI environment and it handles scripting quite well using your choice of C# and Javascript. It is actually quite nice. I was amazed that I could write some C# and the variables turned into interface options inside Unity itself. The problem for me at this point is that I don’t have great modeling skills, but I’ve started watching Blender tutorials to develop that skill. So for a couple of days I was working on Blender. Then I happened upon a post about Game Maker. I’ve always been interested in many types of games 2D as well as 3D, and I wanted to get my hands dirty with some 2D sprite making. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to make a few 2D games before diving into 3D.
I tried out the free versions of both Unity3D and Game Maker Studio. At this point I should point out another feature of both of these products that really drives me toward utilizing them instead of hand-coding games from scratch. They both offer exporting to various platforms. With Game Maker you have to pay for the ability, but you can write your game once and export to Windows, Windows 8, Linux, Mac OSX, Android, and HTML5. With Unity3D you can export to a ton of things with the free version, including XBox360, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. However, there are some things you don’t get with the free version like some shaders. The cost of the non-free version of Unity3D is also $1500. For some reason I think that price point is a little high for their maximum profit. I could be wrong, but if Unity went for $200, I would have already bought it, and I’m sure there would be thousands of others who would fork over that much for it.
At any rate, after using Game Maker for a couple of hours I decided it is something I want to devote some time with, so I purchased the pro version on Thursday (April 11). The next day I found out that there was going to a 48 hour Game Maker competition on the /r/gamemaker subreddit. I entered it and after 48 hours of writing a game with a tool that I had just bought, this is what I came up with. I give you Ant Agonists.