The Humble Bundle: Future Game Makers Must See!

[CountofBleck]

So I wasn't exactly sure where else to put this, But I felt this was really important to share.

]The Humble Bundle is selling over $1900 of Game Dev Content for around $12']The Humble Bundle is selling over $1900 of Game Dev Content for around $12

Im pretty sure this is a once in a life time thing, so I wanted to get the word out. After this deal expires though, I guess I can make this thread about The Humble Bundle deals themself.

 

[DukeMagus]

Not that good IMO.

RPG Maker is getting some fantastic works on steam as of late, and it used to be easy to work (i stopped fiddling with it around XP version... do they still use RGSS scripts?), but the result game normally suffers from limited resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio

Game Character hub is an RPG maker-like character creator and heavily dependent on the assets you put on it to create something more or less unique. Engines wise, you can get awesome results with Unity 2d, the only problem is that you'll have to learn c (or it was C++?) which is a pain in the neck (specially compared to pyton or even ruby).

The games themselves are indies and not open source, so you can't fiddle with the source code to learn what the devs used.

Then you have the assets, but i doubt they're THAT good, and for "test projects" (meaning, BEFORE you start making your own full game), free assets can do good as placeholders

there was an OLD sale on humble bundle page with multimedia fusion. maybe they'll do another sale in the future

http://www.clickteam.com/multimedia-fusion-2

 

[KaboomKid]

Oh, that's right, I forgot that there was a point in time where people actually started paying for RPG Maker. Seems like an okay bundle to pick up if that's what you're going for.

Can't speak from experience, but I've actually heard some nice things about Stencyl and Spriter too. I'm not sure how much mileage you can get out of either one, but I know the dev for Ghost Song has a strong preference for Stencyl, and Spriter seems like a decent budget software for handling modular animations. With this bundle though, keep in mind that you're only getting a year license for Stencyl, and the Spriter version offered only activates on Steam.

Still, I guess this might be a nice opportunity for someone to get their feet wet, and maybe compare the fullversions of some of these programs to other freeware that's out there.

 

[DukeMagus]

heh it seems stencyl is using SCRACTH "lego style" programming

https://scratch.mit.edu/

I strongly recommend to fool around in scracth a bit if you never ever saw how a program works (great for kids too!).


NOTE: i don't know almost nothing about programming (couldn't do a Hello World in C to save my own life), but my brother deals with it, so i've learned some concepts... Also reading some No Starch Press books to make office work easier)

 

[Skrylar]

Hmm. I see a lot of steam-exclusive DRMy crap in this bundle (all though since when has humble bundle been anything other than this?) A couple of gems though:

Can't speak from experience, but I've actually heard some nice things about Stencyl and Spriter too. I'm not sure how much mileage you can get out of either one, but I know the dev for Ghost Song has a strong preference for Stencyl, and Spriter seems like a decent budget software for handling modular animations. With this bundle though, keep in mind that you're only getting a year license for Stencyl, and the Spriter version offered only activates on Steam.

Urho3D (an open source engine) has a 2D module that imports Spriter animation rigs, and its the animation format Klei used when they introduced modding support to Don't Starve. Spriter Pro would be worth the bundle alone if you could get the non-steam copy, but you should honestly never buy studio software on steam. Aside from the DRM being worse (the base version of Spriter Pro is just a serial number without activation if I recall), it treats it as a "game" and will be incompatible with any other tools you bought through steam (see here for a reference to needing a workaround to run RPG Maker at the same time as something else.)

Urho3D and Godot are both pretty nice engines if you're willing to script.

I bought Darkbasic when I was a kid. It was not very well built, and the same developers did the AppGameKit.

Sprite Lamp looks pretty cool!

The absolute best pixel art program, in my opinion, is Pro Motion 6. It has amazing support for animations, painting across frames of animations, tileset painting (one mode lets you paint the tileset as though it was an image with an optional grid, which when "finished" is automatically chopped and de-duplicated across the grid to give you the tileset of whatever landscape you drew freely.) Grafx2 is free but not quite as awesome, though still has a fair bit of awesome to it.

Engines wise, you can get awesome results with Unity 2d, the only problem is that you'll have to learn c (or it was C++?) which is a pain in the neck (specially compared to pyton or even ruby)

Unity traditionally uses C#, which is less of a pain in the arse than C++.

 

[Squire Grooktook]

Unity traditionally uses C#, which is less of a pain in the arse than C++.

Unity also uses Java Script, and it's own language called UnityScript.

If you wanna just make a basic 2d game, any kind of programming language knowledge should be good enough to get you started. I learned C++, and didn't learn C# till after I started using Unity, and it didn't make much of a difference for basic 2d demos and stuff.

 

[Skrylar]

If you wanna just make a basic 2d game, any kind of programming language knowledge should be good enough to get you started.

2D games are certainly a lot more fun to write code for.

Art-wise, I'm not sure. I don't know any animators who enjoy keyframing work in 2D, unless their studio lets them use Spine/Spriter/Synfig/Toonboom.

Music guys don't really care, their field's technical problems are pretty much solved

I learned C++, and didn't learn C# till after I started using Unity, and it didn't make much of a difference for basic 2d demos and stuff.

Mono/C# is pretty well built. If I remember years ago it was clocked at running average code only twice as slow as C++, and when a C++ program embeds mono directly its possible to make hooks between the host and client code which communicate at nearly bare-metal speeds for most operations.