16 December 2016

DIY – DEVELOP IT YOURSELF | NO 3

We’ve looked at some rough-cut text adventures and explored the world of RPGs – now it’s time to bring out the big guns: Game Maker: Studio feels a lot like the RPG Maker products, and the graphics on YoYo Games’ website reinforce that impression. However, where RPG Maker is specialized in developing RPGs, Game Maker: Studio doesn’t settle for a specific genre. You can actually build games from a wide range of genres with relative ease: Point and Click adventure games, arcades, action RPGs, platformers, and many other types are possible.

What makes Game Maker: Studio so easy to learn is its drag and drop feature, which lets you build a solid game in no time at all, without coding anything. It’s the Game Maker Language (GML) for programming that sets the tool apart from RPG Maker. Based on C, it gradually teaches you how to code in other languages besides GML. This makes Game Maker: Studio a natural place to begin if you want to really get into coding.

Like Twine and RPG Maker, Game Maker: Studio has an active, growing, and helpful community, which you can reach in a number of ways. If you want to start right now, take a look at the Learn area on YoYo Games. The YoYo Games community provides a choice of tutorials for beginners and advanced users alike. Game Maker: Studio comes in several versions, which range from the free basic version to the Studio Master Collection with all the content you can buy at present.

Want a taste of what you can actually do with this tool? Take a look at the tough platformer Blackhole.

We hope our brief introduction to these three beginner-friendly game development tools will help you find the one that’s right for you. There are plenty more affordable programs that are similarly accessible, like Quest, V-Play, Game Salad, and Stencyl.

If you think you know the basics and want to take your coding skills to the next level, take a look at Unity. We use it to program our own games, and you can do some awesome stuff with it, as Aaron Chapin demonstrated at the Unite 2016 Europe conference. The basic version is free, too. So what’s stopping you from developing your own incredible games?

18 November 2016

DIY – Develop It Yourself | No 1

Have you ever had an idea that would make the perfect game title but you never quite knew how to go bring it to a PC, console, or smartphone? Or were you astonished by a game you played and thought “Man, I’d love to be able to create something like this…”? If so, we have fantastic news for you. As a matter of fact, you don’t have to be an experienced game developer to create awesome games. Titles like Risk of Rain or To the Moon were created with free or pretty cheap tools which are fairly easy to get into.

Because we believe that there can never be enough great games, and because we also started small, in the next three episodes of GOOD Tips, we want to present three great tools to you and go into a little detail about their specifications. And who knows, maybe you’ll be running through our open doors with your awesome prototype some day! 😉

Back in the days when you’d actually feel pretty futuristic about owning one of those machines comparable to a typewriter with a screen, gamers were all over text-based adventures. Basically, you’d be given explanations of your environment and bits of story solely through text shown on your screen. By utilizing your keypad, you’d type different comments like “walk north” or “look at tree” to interact with the imaginary environment. The program would interpret your commands, sometimes leading to frustrating encounters when the parser wasn’t able to understand your intentions. Some people love this raw experience, though. Later, music or images were added to make the games more atmospheric, but the focus lay and still lies on typing text to advance.

While nowadays these games seem pretty dated and rough, they make a great entry point to game development! One tool to get into creating text-based adventures is Twine. It’s freely available on the creator’s homepage and allows you to create your very first game without typing any code. What makes Twine both easy to comprehend and stand out in comparison to similar tools like Quest, are the well-arranged story maps. These clearly visualize the connections between your text elements and dialog pieces, eventually taking the shape of easily editable concept trees. If you feel more adventurous, you can add variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript to grant players a more complex and immersive experience. As with the other tools presented in this blog post, there are tons of tutorials and lots of documentation compressed in a corresponding Wiki, and you can always ask for help in the thriving forums.

A really good example for a Twine game is The Temple of No by Crows Crows Crows. Try it out and get inspired!

15 August 2016

5 years Goodgame Empire – the hype lives on!

Today we are celebrating a very special day at Goodgame: five years ago on this day, our browser game Goodgame Empire first saw the light of day! Five years – that’s an eternity in the world of online games. We’re therefore happier than ever about our loyal Empire fan base, and we bet there are some castle lords who have been with us since the very beginning. A few more players have signed up for Empire in the meantime, of course, and are now busy conquering the medieval online worlds with their castles. The game currently boasts 85 million (!) players – that’s more than the entire population of Germany!

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