Elysian Shadows

I generally try not to concern myself with the doings of ignorant morons these days... We are programmers, artists, musicians, and engineers. We can sit around waving our dicks at each other all day about whose technology or methodology is superior... Or we can sit down, shut the fuck up, get to work, and let our hard work and finished product speak for itself.

GyroVorbis wrote:I generally try not to concern myself with the doings of ignorant morons these days... We are programmers, artists, musicians, and engineers. We can sit around waving our dicks at each other all day about whose technology or methodology is superior... Or we can sit down, shut the fuck up, get to work, and let our hard work and finished product speak for itself.

Chris Bryant likes this.

GyroVorbis wrote:I generally try not to concern myself with the doings of ignorant morons these days... We are programmers, artists, musicians, and engineers. We can sit around waving our dicks at each other all day about whose technology or methodology is superior... Or we can sit down, shut the fuck up, get to work, and let our hard work and finished product speak for itself.

Exactly. It's results that matter. The thing that concerns me is that the callers kid is 17... that seems like a weird age. At that age, other things should really be keeping your attention, it's a little old for learning to program, and a little young for properly learning to program... at 17 I had the attention span of a gnat, if it didn't involve women and/or beer :D.

Van-B wrote:Exactly. It's results that matter. The thing that concerns me is that the callers kid is 17... that seems like a weird age. At that age, other things should really be keeping your attention, it's a little old for learning to program, and a little young for properly learning to program... at 17 I had the attention span of a gnat, if it didn't involve women and/or beer :D.

At 17 I--oh wait, I am 17. Yeah, I'm doing just fine.

LeonBlade wrote:I say start from scratch and learn it all yourself, and not be like most Indie Developers that whip out a simple game and charge money for it so that loads of people go out and buy it and then you're rich off some shitty ass game.

I say, learn C/C++ and go at it. It may take you longer, but hell whenever you get something done you'll feel really accomplished.

I hope that wasn't pointed at me.

Most shitty ass games don't get many sales - hell, nearly every mediocre or good indie game/app out their barely gets any sales. It's only those that people enjoyed playing and were good at telling people that they exist that really did well. The process of releasing a game to the public can have a humbling effect on the developer since you actually have to deal with other people's perceptions of the game.

Gyroball, for example, does a poor job of helping out new users - the controls are way too twitchy and people find that frustrating. I can argue until I'm blue in the face that this "adds challenge" to the game and creates a learning curve - but getting it out there for people to tell me about it is a much better indication of reality. I'd have never learned that however if I didn't get the game playtested and released**. If you want an example of a game that does an amazing job of managing level of difficulty and pacing then look at Angry Birds (sold over 100 million) - developed by a small company in Finland. I now appreciate how important that is to an application (especially a game), though I doubt I would have had the same appreciation had I not released my game.

And you can't say that going from having a minimal amount of programming experience to releasing a game while working and going to school isn't something to feel really accomplished about. There are multiple paths to accomplishment. I agree that really learning C/C++ is good and is worth doing - but so is learning anything else that gives you insight and a toolset to accomplish your goals***. It's about picking the right tool for the right job. Personally, I'm really interested in the Android platform right now so Java really appeals to me.


**Actually, I may have learned that earlier if I had a way to build a simple prototype and have people play it - and I certainly have a greater appreciation for the power of prototyping than I used to.

***EDIT: And I'm sorry if I'm coming across as being overly defensive, but I'm sick of seeing the attitude from some people here that "if it's not C/C++, it's not worth feeling proud of". I initially came to these forums because there were a lot of experienced members who seemed down to earth, as opposed to many other places I've seen the seem to speak from ivory towers with their very protected notions about how the [programming] world worked (whether that be an academic or corporate perspective). There's room here to be creative, screw up, and realize when something did or didn't work.

There's App Game Kit as well... Which will come in 2 flavors, BASIC style syntax, and C++ with some lower level features. The benefit though, is that AGK will compile for Android, Bada, iOS, Windows etc etc - possibly coming to the 360 as well. Cross platform network support, automatic scaling, write once and compile to several platforms. It's only 2D for now, but will have Box2D physics built in - it could well be a great solution for indi developers who want to target several platforms without the hoohah. I mean, iOS is a really nice system for programming, once only you move away from all the interface design crap and get into coding with more traditional techniques. I really like the idea of being able to buy say, a cheap Android tablet, and then get into software development for it with no learning curve at all - just add it as a deployment device and compile to it via WiFi.

@Van-B
That looks very cool. 2D sounds like a really good fit for what isn't yet out there (since Unity seems to cover 3D pretty well for cross-platform game development).