Scrolling Game Development Kit Forum

Just go with C++.  C# is nice and all...but C++ will be better to learn.

If you want to just write game dev scripts, you don't really need VB to do that.  If you think you want to get into programming, there's better things to learn than VB.  If you want to shell out money, try buying Microsoft C++, you'll save yourself about $800 dollars and that's just if you want to spend money on it.  If you want something completely free, download something like Textpad and just learn Java (though C++ is better for game development).  Not to knock Game Dev or people that actually use VB for things outside of prototyping, but VB isn't used for much outside of making prototypes.  If you want to make a quick good looking app, VB isn't too bad.  If you want to actually program something, learn C++ and it will take you much further.

Assuming your profile is right, you have a lot of time to learn.  You don't have to jump right in and buy the most expensive software right away.  Play around with the free stuff or at least the cheaper things before you go out and buy visual studio and learn on something a little better than VB.  If you think you're serious about getting into game development as a programmer, VB will get you absolutely nowhere, it's not even that great of a learning tool.

I've done projects with documentation and projects without documentation and I must say that it is much easier with.  It is a little more effort making that documentation, but it is worth it in my honest opinion.

Before I learned the wonders of using things like a GDD and such, I would have agreed that making those things would be a huge waste of time; of course then my track record for completed games and actual well laid out games and levels was press low.  With smaller things like NWN levels and modules, a nice LDD does wonders because it just provides a road map and keeps you on track.  When I made my NWN levels and modules, I just started with an idea and made things as I went.  It sounded nice and I thought it was a great way of doing things, but I either rarely finished things, decided the level wasn't as good as I thought, found out some things wouldn't be feasible, or just wasn't fun.  The same thing happened to me when I made games using the RPG Maker.  I would start with an idea, story, and gimmick and just go.  I would know I wanted whatever area and some dungeons along the way, but nothing was really planned and things just easily fell apart and became too complicated.

Now that I know that documentation actually does help, I love it (of course not asking you to love making documents, I'm just weird like that).  Making those documents provides me with a nice little road map that keeps me on track, makes me think about what I'm putting into a game, and lets me decide if the game is fun and even feasible.  Even with a smaller puzzle based game, I would still like to have something that resembles a GDD just because it would help keep everything in the game consistent.  Without something telling you what the feel of the game and other things like that, it's just too easy to add the "wouldn't it be cool if..." features that can easily ruin a game or turn it into a never ending project.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tell people to write 30+ page documents in their spare time, but for a pseudo GDD you could just have your story, feel of the game, art style, key gameplay features, and things like that.  For a pseudo LDD, you could have quick more detailed notes about the look and feel of the level, the wow moments, maps and other things.

Maybe part of having a neat plan has to do with conformity.  I believe it keeps developers from truly coming up with unique and innovate gameplay.  So you gotta leave some of that up to chance.  But for me, it's still a hobby, and I'm not under the gun, so I'm going to try to pack in as many "gimmicks" as I can.  Part of that has to do with creating a template for my future projects.  It provides me with a recipe book, gives me more flexibility in the future.  I mean, wouldn't it be hard to make a plan unless you had all the parts ready? 

Plans don't really keep developers from truly coming up with unique and innovative gameplay; they're what lets them come up with unique and innovative gameplay.  I've seen people create games with no real plan other than we're making an unreal mod, it needs to be in a house, and we want ghosts.  By the end, they had indians, vikings, New york lawyers, chefs, and rune based magic all because they didn't really have a plan.  I just don't think you know the huge amount of planning that goes into every little step of creating a game.  Everything down to the day is planned out before production of the actual game begins and is very important.  Without those type of plans, you have things like Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever. 

I'm truly not trying to start any type of flame war here, but you say that it would be hard to pan without having all parts ready.  Why would you even consider starting to make a game if you didn't know everything that was going to be in it?

WHAT THE HELL!!???

That stupid magazine gave OBLIVION a 6/10!!!!!!!!!!!

I hate to bring up a dead topic, but honostly, this is pretty close to whave I gave Oblivion (I have it a 7.7 with my little review system).

It's fun and all and has really pretty graphics, but there are A LOT of blaring problems.  Just to list a few...

• FPS

Anygame that gets that bad of FPS is sloppy and just doesn't deserve that high of a rating.  Yes, when I'm standing still in a building with maybe 1 person walking around, I get fine frames per second, otherwise, everything is just really choppy.  When I'm walking in the world, it starts to just get terrible, and anytime I'm fighting a small group of people and one of them is casting magic, I might as well just get out the sword and randomly swinging because that's about the only thing I can do.  When the FPS constantly gets so bad that during battle I can't use my bow or magic, that just isn't fun.

• Bugs!

I don't really mind a few bugs and completely understand having a few bugs, but Oblivion has more than a few bugs and it just takes away from the whole game experience.  To make things worse on top of all the bugs, it even has a memory leak just to make my FPS even worse than it already is.

• AI

Honostly, I could make better AI in Scrolling Game Dev (no offense Ben).  When there are two enemies standing next to each other and one mysteriously falls down, I would hope his buddy would have the common sense to check things out, but nope, that doesn't happen in Oblivion world.  I would even like it if the enemy bothered to use basic tactics when fighting you rather than standing in front of you and swinging and moving back every now and then.  Oblivion seriously dropped the ball on the AI, if they had the AI of F.E.A.R., I could probably ignore most of the other problems and be happy.

• Leveling

The leveling system in Oblivion is just asinine.  If you don't plan your character from the first step you take, you're screwed.  Yes, this is probably just a personal dislike, but any system where if you don't know exactly how the sytem works and know exactly what you want your character to be from your first step you get a character that can't beat the game on hard is just silly.

• UI

First off, let us change the sensitivity on the mouse settings for the menu! (not the game which it does, but for the menus)  After that, since the game was made for the XBox 360, the item screen is just stupid.  You can only see about 5 items at a time and you have a horribly long list of crap to go through that is poorly sorted.  Then there's the map.  Why must it be so small!?  I know there's a spot I have to go to in whatever town, but it takes me forever to find it because I'm spending most of my time scrolling around the redicuously small map to find it.  I could go on with the menu and UI problems, but it just isn't worth it.

• The Horses

This is probably another personal thing, but I hate the horses.  They're not that much faster, the die easily, and I'm the one that often kills the stupid thing because it gets in the middle of battle and enemies tend to go for the horse before they go for me.  Oh, and the whole paying for the official mod releases is just silly (especially the horse one because, well, the horses suck).

• The TES Editor

I don't think they could have made this thing more user unfriendly if they tried.  A horrible interface, very akward and clumsy controls, not being able to rotate pieces (so it's essentially just tile based), and only supports up to Max 4.x, yeah, that's my idea of a good editor.  I was hoping to get a good chance to play around with the editor over break, but it's just honostly a horrible editor.  About the only plus to it is that the scripting isn't bad.  Other than that, it's just a bad editor.


All in all, the game was just poorly made.  All the attention seemed to placed on the really pretty graphics and adding a lot of quests and then everything else was just thrown in.  Don't get me wrong, I love the graphics and appreciate the large amounts of quests, but all the other problems of the game just completely outweigh the good parts and Oblivion really shouldn't have gotten as high of scores as it did.

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The textures themselves don't look too bad, but they still blend togather.  Now, that might look different when the game is actually being played and you add the various decorations, but right now, it looks like they're all the same hill.

My advice for that scene is to bring down the background hills some.  That will make them look a little further away (I think) and hopefully that's what you want.  Are you having them parrallax at all?  If so, have them parrallax in the x and y direction (only a little bit in the up and down direction), that would help too after bringing them down.  The other thing that might help would be to make the ground on the frontmost layer stand out somehow.  Add flowers, dirt, rocks, whatever, to let the player know where they are stepping.

-edit-

Just looked at the scenes again and noticed something: you have a lot of detail in the hills behind the player.  I'm assuming those hills are far away (if not, ignore this) and they don't need a lot of detail.  You don't need those separate little blades of grass sticking up, just try to make it look fairly rounded and you should be good.  You can of course keep the grass, just this might save you some work later on when adding more detail.

Sadly, heybedaymun is right about the depth and contrast.  I know you're going for cartoony, but you do need to think about color and form when you're making your tilesets. 

The first thing is that if your game hurts my eyes, I'm not going to play it.  The background shouldn't have such bright colors unless you really need those colors.  Try making the background Mario blue with maybe some simple little clouds in there, that might help. 

The second thing I noticed is that you're using a lot of lines that run off the edge of the screen and objects.  That is making your scene look very flat.  Once again, I know you're going for cartoon style, but try removing the lines and that will give your picture a little more depth to it.

For the first two picture, the ground looks fine except maybe the grass.  Use the tutorial level with SGDK that eaches you how to use gradient and that would make the grass look better.  For the trees, bring the lighter things forward and the darker ones back, that will help add a little more depth to the area.  Also, figure out where the light might come from and add a little bit of very simple shading.  Even cartoons have some shading and shadow to make things at least believable.  You might also want to darken the trees.  I'm assuming you're not using MS Paint so you have quite a few colors to play with so take advantage of that.  Your lizard blends in with your trees and can easily get lost in them.  The last thing that really needs to be looked at for now is the water.  I would either take away a lot of the spikes or even better yet just not use them.  I'm guessing you're making them move, but you can get away with that effect pretty easily without the spikes.

For the third picture. the first thing would probably be get rid of those yellow lines.  Diagonal + yellow really makes them stand out more than anything in the scene and you don't usually want your background being the focus.

All in all, I can tell you put some time and detail into this and it's a good start, but it all looks pretty much like programmer art (and I can say that because I use to be a programmer :-p) and/or placeholder art because it is just so flat.  Even looking at the Mario pictures, the background, characters, and foreground are all seperate because of minor little details and proper use of color.  Yes, hebedaymun is a jerk, but he is at least making some sense.

I think either very basic tutorials or better documentation would help.  Even with programming experience (my BS in computer science and even the other programmers who are actually quite good) the documentation isn't clear.  It takes quite a bit of work to figure out what goes where and the shooting script tutorial really doesn't help much unless you actually know what you're looking for and then it still doesn't help a lot.  I think maybe simple tutorials on sprite frame, shooting script, and raising special events with special funtion tutorials would help ease people into scripting and give them a base in which they could take further to better script their games.  Of course that's just me being random and sleep deprived.