Varine
And as the moon rises, we shall prepare for war
- Reaction score
- 805
You have provided me a great excuse to not give a shit about my Russian homework for a bit, as I really do not want to do it for some reason.
My team (and myself) are still amazed by Minecraft's success. We CANNOT figure out why anyone is paying for that stupid thing, but apparently there is a large market for even that insulting mass of simulated autism. I can't even imagine releasing something that looked like that. Even at alpha, my game's can't be as bad as I find Minecraft to be (or it wouldn't be alpha). I honestly do believe that the guy who made Minecraft took a few weeks off work and bought Java for Idiots and is now making fun of everyone. And yes, I am slightly mad I didn't do it first, however in my defense I've been preoccupied developing actual applications, and probably would have too much pride to put my name on something like that anyway. Now that we're talking about, I'm tempted to take Minecraft, remake it this summer with better graphics and improved functionality (as if it would be hard....), and release it for free to make my point even more solidified. I'll call it Cavecraft. Or DugDig.
There are various engines that have web deployment capabilities if that's how you want to do it. The only two I know of are ShiVa and Unity, as that's not a feature I look for or care about. But really you could do pretty much everything you said with almost any engine (as you can with most games).
I would recommend looking into this a lot more. Not meaning any offense, but with the lack of basic knowledge on how things, such as game engines, work, you will likely not get very far and you won't get there very fast. Pretty much every game is built using an engine. It's basically the tools required to build the game. The World Editor for Warcraft or the Galaxy Editor for Starcraft are, in a sense, game engines that compile something that runs using Warcraft or Starcraft respectively. Only they compile standalone products. Level editors, scripting, compiling, etc, are typically done with a game engine. They take years of work (the one we're working on isn't expected to be remotely done for years - I'll likely be done with my undergrads, which is like three or fours years, and possibly nearing completion with my graduate work, which is like six years). Designing game engines are where knowing a lot of math comes in handy.
There isn't a 'step by step' guide that you're going to find to make an actual game. There are examples, but most of the games that you'll find in tutorials won't sell for anything - otherwise someone already would have done that. They're usually small projects designed around something specific for the lesson or whatever. You're probably going to have to do some programming - most engines will be built with CPP. A couple are built with Java, but those are going to run slower and Java blows (unless you don't know CPP, in which case you're probably not a very good programmer anyway). Some older ones are written with C (Quake III was I think, it's ridiculous). Most of the time they'll have a proprietary language (like Warcraft had JASS) that you'll use for most of the game programming, but if you modify the source chances are you will need to be really good with CPP or you will probably get totally lost in a few minutes and have no idea what you're even looking for.
You will also need a modeler - even if those models amount to 12 tri cubes, you'll need someone to make them and deal with the UVW's and textures. Blender is open source, there are a couple of others that are free to use but it's unlikely they're worth the effort. Professional tools like 3DS Max/Maya are ~$3500. Or someone to make sprites if it's 2D.
3DBuzz has some tutorials on basic programming and modeling. There are plenty of other references as well - CGsociety is a fairly large forum for CG work. There are a lot of forums for programming, and game design in general I'd imagine, to ask questions. This isn't really the best place for help with game design.
My team (and myself) are still amazed by Minecraft's success. We CANNOT figure out why anyone is paying for that stupid thing, but apparently there is a large market for even that insulting mass of simulated autism. I can't even imagine releasing something that looked like that. Even at alpha, my game's can't be as bad as I find Minecraft to be (or it wouldn't be alpha). I honestly do believe that the guy who made Minecraft took a few weeks off work and bought Java for Idiots and is now making fun of everyone. And yes, I am slightly mad I didn't do it first, however in my defense I've been preoccupied developing actual applications, and probably would have too much pride to put my name on something like that anyway. Now that we're talking about, I'm tempted to take Minecraft, remake it this summer with better graphics and improved functionality (as if it would be hard....), and release it for free to make my point even more solidified. I'll call it Cavecraft. Or DugDig.
There are various engines that have web deployment capabilities if that's how you want to do it. The only two I know of are ShiVa and Unity, as that's not a feature I look for or care about. But really you could do pretty much everything you said with almost any engine (as you can with most games).
I would recommend looking into this a lot more. Not meaning any offense, but with the lack of basic knowledge on how things, such as game engines, work, you will likely not get very far and you won't get there very fast. Pretty much every game is built using an engine. It's basically the tools required to build the game. The World Editor for Warcraft or the Galaxy Editor for Starcraft are, in a sense, game engines that compile something that runs using Warcraft or Starcraft respectively. Only they compile standalone products. Level editors, scripting, compiling, etc, are typically done with a game engine. They take years of work (the one we're working on isn't expected to be remotely done for years - I'll likely be done with my undergrads, which is like three or fours years, and possibly nearing completion with my graduate work, which is like six years). Designing game engines are where knowing a lot of math comes in handy.
There isn't a 'step by step' guide that you're going to find to make an actual game. There are examples, but most of the games that you'll find in tutorials won't sell for anything - otherwise someone already would have done that. They're usually small projects designed around something specific for the lesson or whatever. You're probably going to have to do some programming - most engines will be built with CPP. A couple are built with Java, but those are going to run slower and Java blows (unless you don't know CPP, in which case you're probably not a very good programmer anyway). Some older ones are written with C (Quake III was I think, it's ridiculous). Most of the time they'll have a proprietary language (like Warcraft had JASS) that you'll use for most of the game programming, but if you modify the source chances are you will need to be really good with CPP or you will probably get totally lost in a few minutes and have no idea what you're even looking for.
You will also need a modeler - even if those models amount to 12 tri cubes, you'll need someone to make them and deal with the UVW's and textures. Blender is open source, there are a couple of others that are free to use but it's unlikely they're worth the effort. Professional tools like 3DS Max/Maya are ~$3500. Or someone to make sprites if it's 2D.
3DBuzz has some tutorials on basic programming and modeling. There are plenty of other references as well - CGsociety is a fairly large forum for CG work. There are a lot of forums for programming, and game design in general I'd imagine, to ask questions. This isn't really the best place for help with game design.