Show your progress :)

#41 This is so cool! TGE is awesome, but making 3D games is a lot harder than 2D. I love seeing a lot of ideas being tried out, and I am sure, even finished:) I'm looking forward to some innovation and FUN.

-Jeff Tunnell GG

#42 I think that's one of the keys to T2D, Jeff. I look at what I've done with TGE, and I've learned a ***HUGE*** amount...but I've also learned what projects that I don't want to work on as opposed to what I thought I wanted to work on. I've learned all of the things that I've been saying for a long time, but never realized. It's the same thing you've been saying for years (right size your life, etc). With T2D I say down and looked at my designs and decided on one that I loved, marketability be damned. And I can say that because I'm a hobbyist. It would be great if I could walk into the world that indies work in, but right now I have the ability to do what I want. I also have the problem of not having set deadlines because it's only me and I'm a hobbyist.

But T2D is one of the most exciting things to come out of GG in a long time. And even though I love the amazing things that have come out in the last few years, T2D takes it to a previously unexperienced level. I come from a hobbyist mentality that also had a number of industry contacts, and I realized that tools are in rare capacity unless you hire someone to make them. So I took free tools for granted and learned them because it made me more productive and I knew that I couldn't afford licensing of a number of professional tools that my friends were using. I have friends in the industry who paid to contract someone to crack Max because they couldn't afford it. And yet they had a hardware budget that put modeling machines on their desks that they couldn't support with software. And then the Max exploits would make it out to the net, which is the worst part of it because once the project was complete, the software budget would expand and licensing. And yet their cracks made their own licenses go up in compensation for pirating loss. The larger the company gets and the more the auditors set their sights, the less and less a small company can do such things. Not that they wanted to do it since they know that their piracy is a silent validation to anyone who pirates their game. But extreme measures lead to extreme solutions, and the perform now and ask for forgiveness (sadly in litigation) later is often a better solution when it comes to publishers who have huge legal teams to find anything they can find to make them not be at fault.

Damn. I need to not brain dump so much. The last topic I did this in died horribly, though, after a parody post I doubt according to my posts.

T2D is an amazing step for GG and indie game development. Right now it's a huge programmer development state, but as it progresses and the editors become more intutive and artist friendly, it will be a HUGE push in the indie market. I don't know what the binary edition will hold, but I doubt it will compete with the "free" market of GameMaker. But I'm sure it will compete with the commercial market that Game Maker has...but on a multi-platform release. There are other engines that cost a few hundred dollars for 2D Game Maker-esque production, but I really think that T2D is the best option even now in EA release. And that's from playing with the layer and tiling system which are a bit more unintuitive than other more documented facilities. I say unintuitive simply because it's not the same direction that a lot of engines have taken in the past, and Melv has made some excellent choices based on careful research for longevity of the engine rather than an implementation specific approach.

EDIT: changed wording to be positive rather than negative. I should really proof my posts...

#43 When you dump your brain David usually good things come out, always enjoy reading whats on your mind, agree with a lot of what you say, including the market T2D is hitting.

that said, keep the pics coming :)

#44 [quote][bold]David Blake says:[\bold]I doubt it will compete with the "free" market of GameMaker. But I'm sure it will compete with the commercial market that Game Maker has...but on a multi-platform release.[\quote]

I have to respectfully disagree with you David, at least on one front. I started my commercial game in GameMaker. It's a good tool, but *very* limited. There are many things it can't do. It doesn't handle complex interactions after a certain point. It doesn't do well with picking up the individual IDs of objects, which makes getting rid of or interacting with a specific object practically a nightmare. Also, (and I've yet to figure out why this is true), whenever you change something in GM, three other things will stop working. (I'm not joking you, I've talked with other people who experienced the same problem.) You spend a massive amount of time rewriting GML you previously had working, even though the scripts are "individual" and shouldn't have any interactions with each other.

I've only had T2D for two weeks. I already know how to do the same things I was doing in GM and I can do them *faster*. I also have a good handle (logically) on how to go about doing the things that I couldn't get to work in GM; and aside from having to learn the command structure, it's going to be a lot easier.

Just my 2cents. :)

#45 Now this is what I wanted from T2D, lots of Uber cool ideas!

Would anyone here mind if I could use some of these screenshots in the future when discussing what's currently being worked on using T2D?

If you don't mind then I'd just ask if you'd please email me your image and the project name. I will of course put your name/project on it when I use it!

Keep up the great work! :)

- Melv.

#46 Wow, what a buzz! It's simply amazing to be involved with this community. Buying T2d doesn't simply give you an incredible platform, it also gives you access to some of the greatest bunch of people on the net.

*sniff*

:)

#47 Just to restore some perspective to this thread and encourage those who are working on things that may not look as good as the posts so far, I'll show my WIP. Quick warning, the graphics don't even qualify as programmer art at this point, think 3minutes in paint and you'll understand :P Although I do plan on making significant improvements to the graphics once the game plays how I'd like it to :)

Anyhow, continuing my retro gaming urge..


Pickups are working, including switching between each level as you clear the current level. Movement works finally (was suprisingly much harder than I had anticipated to recreate :P)

Still lots to do, especially ghost movement and AI which doesn't exist atm, also ghost/player collisions, sounds, better graphics (maybe that should just be graphics full stop, they can't get much worse :P), animations, special effects, menus.. you get the idea.

That said, its nearly playable :)

#48 Everyone is doing such a good job. Yeah we rock!

#49 @Gina-Marie "Netjera" Hammer
I'm a proponent of teaching the conflicts. While preaching to the choir can be motivating, conflict can create an amazing learning environment as long as it is critical commentary rather than ranting (which on the internet these are often interchangable terms).

The binary version of T2D will not be free, and that puts it outside of the potential "market" for people who want a free tool such as Game Maker. That doesn't mean that it's not limited or that T2D doesn't compare to it feature wise. I'm a HUGE T2D advocate and believe that it's the best 2D development platform currently out there. But it's in a different market because it has a market. There's a price-point associated with it, which will kill off a number of the "GameMaker core" who utilize GM because it's a free engine that they can use to make games.

But I definitely agree that T2D is more powerful and makes much more sense. Like most programming engines, what gets you in trouble is usually your own logic! At least that's how it is for me!

#50 This is one of the coolest GG thread ever, IMO.

I too as a GG developer have been making some great progress. But I haven't much to show due to the fact that I still haven't gotten a prototype artist working for my game (still using stock graphics) and have really only developed some of the more behind the scenes parts of the program. Things are going great otherwise, though, so hopefully I'll be able to post some screenies here soon :)

PS - And thanks once again to Melv for putting so much 2D power in the hands of indies. T2D give me something to look forward to every day!

#51 Tetris taught me enough of how to use the engine. I decided that instead of taking time to add the flash, I'd move on to the bigger project I had in mind. I'm working on a casino game inspired by a SNES game I once played, and my time in Biloxi, MS. But before I actually add all the gameplay elements, I'm working on making it more "object oriented". I'm making a core "CardGame.cs" that deals with the status of the deck, display, shuffling, etc. I'll later make a "Betting.cs" that deals with the same issues of chips, odds, etc. From there, defining actual games such as blackjack, Carribean Stud, Texas Hold em, etc will be a simple matter of specifying when to use each of the different functions of these "subclasses". Anyway, as of now, I got a lot of the core features implemented:


The script to display this looks something like this:

$blackJackGame = new ScriptObject(CardGame);
    $blackJackGame.numJokers=0;
    $blackJackGame.numDecks=2;
    $blackJackGame.numPlayers=2;
    $blackJackGame.sceneGraph=t2dSceneGraph;
    $blackJackGame.setupDeck();
    $blackJackGame.displayBridge("-45 -20");
    $blackJackGame.shuffle();
    $blackJackGame.displayBridge("-45 20");

and I'm sure that I could probably implement this to eliminate a few of these lines as well. Anyway, I still got quite a ways to go generalizing each card game, but when it is all said and done, I will only need one line of script each time my character interacts with a blackjack table.

#52 Ok, here's my project:

It's kinda like breakout, just that you control the ball instead of a paddle.
As you can see I'm still having problems lining up everything correctly. But at least the tiles explode and the ball collides correctly (unless it decides to go into maniac mode an jump around on the screen like ... well, a maniac).

#53 @Jermey: Doh, you beat me to it. I was going to do a kind of card game building kit that would contain a generalized way to make a table and arrange card dealing areas etc. :P

#54 @Lennart: Cool twist! Is that your art? I like it!

@Pat: I'm still designing, if you wanna collaborate... (C: Plus I don't make very nice code sometimes, so if you were planning on making a release version, probably better for the community that you do that than me...heh

#55 @Jeremy:
Glad you like it. The game itself is hard to explain, but easy to pick up during play (I hope).
Everything but the background image and the explosion are rendered graphics (made with bryce). And while I like the blocks and the borders, I think I'll have to redo the "blockers" at the bottom.
My intention is to have (bryce rendered) sci-fi backgrounds for the game so I used a hubble image as a placeholder for now.

#56 I envy your graphical skillz. My game will probably be a stick man walking up to squares...

#57 Jeremy, if you want to maximise your OO design in script, I recommend my OO in T2D Script Resource.

#58 @Gavin - MAN I love your project! TBS has me drooling :D

#59 @Teck Lee & Gina-Marie: Please use the contact form on my website and let me know if you want to beta test ASAP. I couldn't find any public contact info, so this is the only way I could reach you. Apologies for the O.T. spam.
Send me a message if you're interested. Thanks!!

#60 Bryan, saw the resource, and it looks sweet. I'm too timid to go changing my engine just yet. I figure I'll hit the source after I get a little more comfortable with how the engine works.