Make your own game

[deathmetal]

Who knows what the best program is to make your own computer game? Where can I download/buy it?

[MrLinus]

Hehe.. I teach a gaming course where students build their own game using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). Most of the games are adventure/RPG/Story games but some even have arena fighting, strategy and edutainment. And are quite creative!

The power of LAMP lets you ensure that you have a game that people want to play not because of fancy graphics and/or sounds but because of the game.

Anyways, that's my advice. Oh.. and LAMP is still Open Source.

[CXGJarrod]

A lot of people have been using AGS - Adventure Game Studio (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/) To make old style games..

[souleman]

MsMittens!!!!!! Are the games they wrote open source? I think it would be kinda cool if you could post one or two of them (with the students permission of course) just because it would be fun to have a new "underground" game.

[MrLinus]

Might be able to get some from this batch. Two games in particular come to mind: Cruel Angels and Killer Kode.

I'll see about getting them to put it somewhere so people can play and critique.

[Alt_Ctrl_Delete]

has anyone here ever heard of DarkBasic PRO..?
It's the program that the latest games are made with..
here check out this site...

http://www.darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com

cheers
stacy

[delstar]

Alright...my two cents...

First off, DarkBasic isn't the way to make games, unless you're ok with amatuerish style. You'll want to look at OpenGL and DirectX. You'll want to read through Game Programming Gems (or something of that nature). Also familiarize yourself with as many graphic's programs and music creation programs as possible.

Get a good idea of what kind of game you want to make (ie. RPG, RTS, TBS, FPS, etc..) and find a few engines for that type of game.

PS : sorry for any mis-spellings or general confusion...i've had a few tonight...

[Tim_axe]

Making your own computer game can be as simple or as complex as you want. Depending on what kind of game you are planning on making, ie console or something more graphical, you could make your own from the ground up. In fact I'm in the process of working with some friends to make my own game engine from where we will eventually build games. (a lone wolf ) We're still learning more and more about OpenGL and C++ (and eventually OpenAL, Networking, and Input).

You don't need to write your own game engine like we're doing, since it takes a lot of time and we've already run into quite a few issues. This is the 3rd or 4th complete restart of the project, in about 2-3 years. This time I am making sure we make everything much more modular than in the past so if it fails, we at least have parts to reuse.

Anyways, for a basic game, Game Maker should be good. He makes a pretty good version avaliable for free, and you get more features such as networking if you register it for $15 (donation system didn't work). I think he teaches something related to gaming at a college to, and that is where is site is located. http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/

Also, a good website to visit would be http://www.gamedev.net. Lots of game developer information can be found there, and news. Site layout has somewhat of a learning curve though, but is easy to find as you get used to it. And checking out their headlines, do you want to make a game like Tribes 2? You'd still have to program quite a lot to make a game, but you can get a license to use the engine for $100....