Showing posts with label 2D. Show all posts

Monday, 22 September 2014

10 Free Game Development Tools And Other Resources

Maybe you’re getting ready for an upcoming game jam, or looking to get into indie game development for the first time. Whatever your reason for seeking out free and easy-to-use game making tools, I’ve compiled a quick list here just for you!

Some of these programs require a basic understanding of programming to really be used to their fullest, while others don’t even ask for a single line of code. For things like art, music and other assets that can help bring your game to life, as well as additional resources like tutorials, I’ve put together a couple links at the bottom of the page. It’s never a bad time to learn a thing or two about game design! For more indie game dev goods, check out our guide to free user interface resources.

And now, in no particular order:

1.PUZZLE SCRIPT

PuzzleScript is a free, open-source game engine designed to help you make tile-based puzzle games. It was developed in HTML5, so you can run the tool right in your browser and play the games right in your browser. While its IDE-like interface may seem imposing to non-programmers, it’s actually quite straightforward and simple to learn.

Increpare, an influential game designer and the creator of PuzzleScript, has put together a handy beginner’s tutorial here, as well as a more advanced document here. Not feeling inspired? Check out some of the awesome games that have been made with this tool so far!

2. GameMaker

You have a couple options with GameMaker. You can download GameMaker 8.1 and use either the free version or pay $39.99 for the Pro version on Windows, or $19.99 for the Pro version on Mac. Or you can download the free version of GameMaker: Studio or dish out ridiculous amounts of money for the Standard, Professional and Master versions. This list is about freetools, though, so let’s talk about the free versions.

First of all, most people know about GameMaker already. It’s a prominent game creation tool by YoYoGames, with drag-and-drop options and other easy-to-use features for non-programmers, as well as a built-in scripting language for people with a little more experience. The original, freeware version of Spelunky, as well as Hotline Miami, were developed in GameMaker, so despite seeming like a simple tool, its possibilities are vast.

The issue with the Lite and Pro versions of GameMaker 8.1 is YoYoGames will no longer be updating them as they’ve shifted their focus to Studio. However, the limitations on Lite vs. the limitations on the free version of Studio are very different. Lite limits your use of certain advanced functions, like 3D, blending, data structures, etc. There will also be a watermark on your game. The free version of Studio, however, limits your use of resources, like objects, rooms, sprites, sound files, etc. Which one you use depends entirely on your priorities.

3. Construct 2

Construct 2 is similar to GameMaker, but arguably even easier to use if you’re a non-programmer. A lot of basic coding lingo used in GameMaker’s drag-and-drop features is replaced in favor of more straightforward terminology, plus it comes with a lot of simplified visual effects! There are two paid versions, with the free version coming with some limits and restrictions, which you can read more about here. Besides that, it’s a handy tool and a great alternative to GameMaker.

4. Stencyl

Stencyl is cool because it allows you to design games easily, while learning some basic programming logic in the process. By utilizing drag-and-drop within a snappable, block-based environment, Stencyl enables you to code events without actually writing any code, while still allowing you to visualize your game’s logic. Learn more here!

5. Twine

Unlike the previous tools I’ve talked about here, Twine‘s focus is on creating hypertext-based interactive fiction games. Twine games are saved as HTML files and use hyperlinks to connect various scenes and other segments of the game together, rather than relying on a text parser system, as in traditional, text-based adventure games. This, coupled with the intuitive graphical interface that allows you to map out scenes in a web-like environment, makes Twine really easy to learn and use. Anna Anthropy has a great beginner’s tutorial located here.

The kinds of games produced by Twine have often been compared to Choose Your Own Adventure books, but because of the tool’s ability to track variables, player-inputted text, use a variety of unique components, plug-ins and more, the possibilities are really quite vast.

Some of my favorites include Conversations With My Mother by Merritt Kopas, Even Cowgirls Bleed by Christine Love and Panic! by Astrid Bin.

6. Inform 7

Inform is a programming language designed to create player-inputted, command-based interactive fiction. The latest version, Inform 7, comes with its own IDE, library and compiler, all of which you can download here. Inform is unique because it bases its logic off the vocabulary and syntax of natural language, making it relatively easy to comprehend for beginning programmers.

For instance, you could type, “Forest is a room,” which will create Forest as a location in your game world. Then you could type, “Cabin is north of forest,” creating a new location in relation to another. This will connect Cabin to Forest with the user-input command “north” or “go north.” Of course, things get a little more complicated from there, but overall, the language is far more accessible than most when it comes to writing interactive fiction.

A list of resources and tutorials can be found here. I would recommend the Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 textbook by Aaron Reed.

7. Ren’Py

Ren’Py is a free and open source visual novel engine that allows users to combine images, text and sound to create interactive simulation games. A lot of dating sims are made using the visual novel format, but it doesn’t have to be limited to just that.

This software is good for beginners because of its super simple scripting language, but it also allows more experienced coders to write games in Python.

Katawa Shoujo is an example of a popular game built in Ren’Py.

8. Adventure Game Studio

Adventure Game Studio is aimed at more intermediate developers, allowing users to create their own point-and-click or keyboard-controlled adventure games. A lot of popular indie games have been created using this software, including the Blackwell series and Gemini Rue.

9. FlashPunk & Flixel

Why pay for Adobe’s expensive Flash suite when you can just use these free, open-source ActionScript 3 libraries? FlashPunk and Flixel aren’t game-making tools like the rest of the applications on this list, but they are great if you’re looking to create 2D Flash games and have some experience in object-oriented programming. FlashPunk in particular is based on the GML library, making it a smooth transition point for people looking to break away from GameMaker.

Of course, to make use of these libraries, you’ll need to download a separate IDE to work in.FlashDevelop is a free and open-source code editor recommended by the developers of both FlashPunk and Flixel. The two have compiled a great list of resources, tutorials and other information here to help you get started.

10. Unity

Like GameMaker, including Unity on this list was an obvious choice. Unity is a game engine that supports development across an impressive range of platforms, making it one of the most popular game development tools right now. It comes with a built-in IDE, is useful for making both 3D and 2D games and has a huge asset store available.

One downside to Unity is that it’s free as long as you’re not using it for a hefty commercial gain. If your annual gross income exceeds $100,000, you’re required to buy a Unity Pro license for $1,500. The Pro version does come with some additional features, though!

11. RPG Maker XP

Whoa! You said there were only ten things on this list!

Well, technically, I said there were ten free things on this list… even though I did go over that by including FlashPunk and Flixel, but I don’t care. Who complains about getting more than they expected?

RPG Maker isn’t free, even though [SECRET]most people I know who use it didn’t exactly pay for it.[/SECRET]

I’m not encouraging piracy here, but I just couldn’t let this list be completed without RPG Maker XP. RPG Maker 98 and XP were my first game-making tools growing up, and I love, love lovethem. There’s a free trial for RPG Maker XP you can install here, or you can dish out the $30 to buy it here.

I haven’t heard the best things about RPG Maker VX, but it is their newest product, so there’s that too.

Additional Resources

Blender: Free 3D modeling software.
Tiled: A free, tile-based map editor.
Pixel Art Tutorial: By Derek Yu.
AGS Resources: Assets and plug-ins for Adventure Game Studio.
Bfxr: Free sound effects generator.
BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS: A free glitch art painting program.
Twine Macros: By Leon Arnott.
Philome.la: Host your Twine games for free here!

SOURCE : www.indiestatik.com

Do you have a good resource I should add to this list? Let me know in the comments below!

Saturday, 10 May 2014

Lucid Labs’ ROTO is out now, and it’s pretty good

Lucid Labs, a new indie studio comprised of a group of college friends, has released its first game, ROTO. It’s a minimalist puzzle-platformer for mobile, and it’s pretty damn good. roto-001

Immerse yourself in this circular adventure filled with big and mean balls and experience the next level of puzzle-platformer awesomeness!

Download now for free!
http://bit.ly/Rotogame

ROTO: A Simple Circular Puzzle - Android Apps on Google Play

play.google.com

Lose yourself in a world full of balls, small and big, and jump from one ball to the other with just a tap.
Are you looking for a fresh and unique puzzl...

The game has you controlling a small ball as it makes its way from point A to B, hopping across larger, constantly rotating balls. You can collect stars along the way if you’d like to ace the level, but this route isn’t as straightforward and is often fraught with danger in the form of saws and other hazards.

Levels are short and the one-touch controls add to the game’s minimalist theme, which uses a clean, primarily monochrome art style, with only the occasional dash of colour when a new type of ball is introduced.

ROTO takes only a few seconds to get used to, but it is by no means easy. Like all good puzzle-platformers, timing is key here. Failure is a regular occurrence, but thanks to the game’s simple design and presentation, you always feel like you’ll easily get through the next time, and therein lies its charm.

ROTO is out now on Android and you really should check it out. It’s a free, ad-supported game and includes 50 levels, with over 100 more to come in the future. An iOS version of the game is also in the works.

Monday, 21 April 2014

UNITY TIPS THAT EVERY DEVELOPERS SHOULD KNOW

5 tips every Unity developer should know

Whether you’re new to developing with Unity or are well-versed in using the tool, we all can appreciate tips that will improve our workflow. With the help of veteran developers who either are or have been part of the official Unity Support Team, I’ve put together a list of great tips that every Unity developer should know and use.

Unity error searching

If you are searching for the meaning or solution to an error message you received in Unity, you can easily find documentation about the specific error with a site search. Using Google, type “site:unity3d.com” followed by your error message. This searches for that error throughout all of Unity’s site and resources, including their forms, tutorials, API documentation and knowledge base all at once.

Garbage collection

If you ever find yourself with the problem of a consistent stutter in your frame rate, which is especially noticeable on a mobile build, the culprit is usually related togarbage collection (GC). GC attempts to reclaim memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by the game. These are some of the common improvements and misuses which affect the GC.

GameObject instantiate and destroy

If you make frequent calls to instantiate and destroy throughout the lifetime of your game or app, this could affect the GC substantially. Try to create a pool of game objects at the start of your game, which you can then enable and disable throughout your game.

GetComponents

This might be used in tandem with interfacing to create a modular way of having your game objects interact with each other. A collection of components is generated and returned when GetComponents is called, and once this collection is no longer needed, it triggers the GC. Make sure you profile its use and determine if it’s acceptable. You might have to develop another type of architecture to support your game object interaction that does not depend on GetComponents.

String concatenation

This is very common for C# developers. When you concatenate strings (“Hello” + “World”) you are creating a new string object. If you do this each frame, you are adding a good amount of unnecessary GC work when you could be caching or concatenating without +.

Profiler

For those with Unity Pro, the profiler is an invaluable tool that allows you to detect memory leaks and garbage collection issues before your players do. You can run the profiler remotely with Android, iOS and web browsers which will test your game on the actual platform instead the editor. Also when you’re testing remotely, the profiler won’t affect performance like it does when it runs in the editor on the same machine, giving you more accurate data. Another great feature of the profiler is the ability to create code blocks that profile your scripts. You can place the start and finish profiler calls anywhere in your script and really start to dig deep into your game’s or individual algorithm’s performance. If you don’t have Unity Pro, there are some third-party profilers in the Unity Asset Store that work with the free version.

Interfacing behavior

As you become more experienced and comfortable with Unity and design principles, you eventually come to an important conclusion: The more generic a script is, the more it can be reused, making less duplicate code. And the less duplicate code and maintenance there is, the quicker one can roll out a new game. This is a great thing!

And if you develop in C#, once you learn about interfaces and abstract classes, your scripts can even get more generic. I would go as far as saying that with interfaces, you can achieve the most generic design of a single game’s concern or responsibility.

Imagine having a player and an enemy game object in Unity each with their own scripts: a player script, and an enemy script. As these scripts are developed to handle the responsibility of dying for example, chances are it will start to smell of duplicate code. At this point you could create a separate death script with the duplicate code removed from both player and enemy. This is an improvement, but now you’ve created a dependency love triangle between these three scripts. We could instead create an IKillable or IDeath interface. This allows us to easily identify a single responsibility for the concept of dying. At this point we would create a PlayerDeath and EnemyDeath implementation.

But don’t go crazy here either. When some developers first start to use interfaces, they tend to use them for almost every class. This could end up causing the same maintenance problems you were trying to fix, or it could just be a waste of time. There are certain rules and situations which call for the use of interfaces. Make sure you’re aware of them.

Test-driven development

Like a rocketship, test-driven development (TDD) for an individual or group that hasn’t used it before is hard to get off the ground. But once you do, it’s smooth sailing and the benefits begin to show themselves. It all begins with a test that defines the expected behavior of a feature. For example, say your character needs to spawn,at a specific position when they die. You write a test that spawns a player, kills them, then asserts that their position is near that spawn position (or that they collided with a spawn pad maybe). The key is that the spawn code to make the test pass does not exist when you write the test. You only add enough code to make your game compile, which could mean writing an empty spawn class and function. Once the test fails (since you do not have your spawn implementation), you can begin to work towards making it pass. Once the test passes, you can move on to the next feature.

TDD can get much more elaborate, but the benefits are clearly great. Imagine running dozens of tests which all light up green, meaning your game is working as expected. If you get advanced with continuous integration, you can commit your game to source control. This automatically builds, tests and deploys your game for you. Your team can even receive emails when your game passes or fails tests. The downside to TDD, which my team has experienced, has been in maintaining the tests. We wrote hundreds of tests for a third-party Unity testing system, which the developers gave up on. We ended up having to convert them over to Unity’s official test tools, which has just recently been released, and it was time consuming.

Applying these tips when you’re developing with Unity can save you time and frustration. Do you have any methods that make your Unity workflow easier? What are your must-know Unity tips and tricks?