Got An Awful Urge To Make A Game...

RopeDrink

Seeing as I've been taking a lot of time out from WoW and been working on Photoshop Projects I've often taken time out from it by experimenting with / playing free web games.

Problem is some of them have been unintentionally inspiring and are plucking at my creative mind.

Most notable of the lot was Monsters Den (On Kongregate Website) and from a visual standpoint it looks so damn simple as a randomized dungeon crawl RPG.

Then I tried out Robot Unicorn Attack and for such a simple platformer it can be very addictive.

Lastly I fondly remember a few playthroughs of The Farm and the one definitive factor with them all is that as simple and small as they all are, they'd seem easy to make and more rewarding an achievement to create than a too 'in depth' game.

Sadly, outside of game modifications, the only full game I've made was done so via "The Games Factory" and was a customizable Breakout Clone that I had intended to make as some sort of Bat'n'Ball RPG... I have a bad habit of trying to turn something simple into something far too complex for it's own good (Even if I'm hellishly proud of that game purely because it's mine).

So I'm currently biting off the urge to pop up Photoshop and start drawing sprite frames... If I lapse, I'm not sure what slant to take... Side Scrolling Point'n'Click Shooter, RPG or a Platformer.

No idea what this thread is aiming for as I'm not looking for advice though general thoughts or even suggestions would be welcome - Anyone else just... Got an urge to flex their creativity in a game sense? You never know, maybe if something happens from it we could adopt a collaberative effort.

richieffff

i think you should go for it and try to create your own game, you never know it might get popular. But nothing is going to happen unless YOU do somethiing.

Nehaxak

Used to do a bit of that myself back in the Amiga days

That sprite you made is not bad at all really, bit of animation (takes so long though as you say) will bring it to life. Try brighten the colours up a bit as it might not play out well with it all being so dark.

He'd look cool in a bit of flash animation, have that sprite run across the screen, grab an advert and pull/drag it back across with a wicked little laugh

Nehaxak

I'm sure you probably know all this stuff but thought I'd post it anyway, I had this site bookmarked in an old graphics bookmark folder...

http://www.doomlegends.com/emporium/tutorials/sprite_basics.html

Some other interesting tidbits on that site too, old but still useful.

Retr0gamer

You could try one of the RPG maker programs, might involve a lot less work than setting up your own algorithms and battles system in Game maker.

catmates

The RPG Maker programs can be helpful if you want to dive right in without learning a lot of code, but this makes them fairly limited and I believe there's been some problems with purchasing them lately. I hear Construct (http://www.scirra.com/) is quite good: they haven't released a final build yet but it's free and the consensus seems to be "Game Maker but better". I've fiddled with it a bit and a lot of it is fairly intuitive, and there's some good tutorials around too. In terms of point and click games Adventure Game Studio http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ is another good free program.

If you want to jump in and start making games I'd suggest entering a contest! There's usually some going on at places like TIGSource or Gamejolt and it's a good way to get to grips with gamemaking over a short period of time. They're pretty fun and informal and you can get some good tips too.