or well in my case a click through textbook.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to get around in the world of coding, sophomore year I coded tetris in java for a class assignment — but making a video game from scratch is an entirely different ball-game. Especially when you don’t have the adequate time to construct the game you want to make. For the first few weeks of this assignment I had my sights set on creating a game actually from scratch, building up the code, the physics and the world — unfortunately due to not wanting to do the project on my own and the previously mentioned lack of time my partner and I turned to one of the alternative game making programs out there.
Stencyl and Twine.
Stencyl to me seemed like the next best option, but nope nope nope nope nope. Unless you want to make a platformer you’re out of luck. And honestly, I’ve seen very few stencyl games — even in their example booklet — that interest me at all. After struggling around the backward coding conventions and terribly (and I mean terribly designed UI) we looked into our other option.
Twine. Now Twine, is actually a well developed game design program. It won’t make you a platformer, but it can handle some serious script manipulation. If my partner and I had not already invested so much time and research into a climate based game we would have completely changed directions and made a fun turn based mystery game. The documentation for Twine (especially compared to stencyl) is fantastic — and it actually interacts with the underlying design code like a regular programming language would.
So in my mini review. If you have time and want to make a cool game use some kind of game engine like Unity. Learning to program isn’t that hard I promise you, but give yourself some time to make what you want. If you don’t have time, design a game for Twine. Whatever you make in stencyl probably isn’t going to be that interesting, at least with Twine you can experiment a little more with narrative and story arc and apply that to future games where you actually have a sprite moving around.
But in terms of the actual game creation. The assignment was particularly frustrating in light of all the stuff we have been reading and seeing throughout the semester. In “Indie Game the Movie” the game dev folks spent years working on their project, years and years. Asking us to build a video game in what amounts to three weeks while juggling a several other classes is practically impossible. It left me wanting to do a whole lot more but without the time to learn how to do it. I feel similarly about film classes when you’re asked to make a final film project. I end up creating something that is nowhere near as useful to me as if I had spent the semester working on it. Unlike a paper though, it could have been something phenomenally cool. I very infrequently do things with papers, but when I create a final project for a class I want it to be something I can show and share with people, friends and the internet. While we learned a lot about the making of and academic thinking behind video games, perhaps if we had also spent some of that time learning how to construct them throughout the semester I would have felt more excited and inspired about this final project.
you can check out my final ‘game’ here if you’re interested. I fear i might have undersold it a bit in this post. I am very proud and happy with the game, i just know that had i spent more than two weeks working on it and more like a full semester i probably could have made a very cool game.