Sticking with Blitzmax

One of my biggest problems is when it comes to game coding I have this nagging feeling I'm always doing everything wrong. The grass is always greener on the other side. I'm investing all this time and effort into something that isn't the best.

In my last blog I talked about GameMaker and was thinking of switching to it. The only reason being is because making a game in GM allowed it to be packaged and exported to other platforms such, mainly IOs and Android. I have very little interest in Android, personally I love it and use it but there are different versions out there, different screen sizes, who needs it. That leaves the all empowering ipad. It's tempting but is it worth it?

I did some reading on what people thought of GM. Yes, it's been around forever no doubt. I read some of the reference manual to learn about GML (the scripting language it uses). The language seems pretty powerful and can probably do a lot of things that Blitzmax can do as well. I have no doubt GM can make great platform type games in a short amount of time as well as other genre's.

Then I started to get that feeling again. A long time ago I was trying to make a game using Torque2D. Same premise, it's a 2D engine that *can* be used to make any type of game you wanted. Even when I had a full handle on T2D and knew a lot about how it worked, it was a struggle to get things to work how I wanted. There were a lot of hurdles and it became exhausting after a while.

When I imported a bunch of sprites sheets into the editor, the editor memory usage spiked up to over a gig then crashed. This was a huge, huge problem. I talked to one of the dev's about it, it was kind of a bug or at the very least a shortcoming of the product. He emailed me a fix, which worked well but not great. I was able to bring in all the sprites without crashing but the editor slowed considerable. Clearly. T2D wasn't design for large levels and hundreds of sprites.

They released an update with a bunch of bug fixes and enhancements but to my surprise the unofficial patch that I received wasn't part of it so the memory problem happened all over again. Now don't get me wrong, T2D is a fine product if you are making a game on a smaller scale but it just wasn't suited to what I needed to do.

Now back to GameMaker. I'm sure it's a fine product but there are limitations. I read it has slow loading times and such would be a real pain to work with. I can see trying to get past coding hurdles just to make things work the way they should. I can see running into even more problems when I have lots of levels with lots of sprites. And for what? Just so I can sell my game on the Ipad?

So yea I'm over it. I also have to kick myself another kick in the ass to stop doing this to myself. There are a million products out there, all of them are good but the crucial point is if it's a right fit for what you are doing. I'm sticking with Blitzmax and my goal for 2013 is to make a damn good old school RPG!

Toying with Switching to Game Maker Studio

Yes I'm back to torturing myself again in deciding what's the best route to develop an old school RPG. I love Blitzmax and I think it's great. I love the fact that it's a language so I can create anything I want with it rather than a level editor. The other day I was reading PC Gamer and they had a section on indies and the software they use to create games, needless to say I couldn't read it fast enough.

Game Maker, I've known about it for a while but never paid it much mind. Game Maker was featured in one of the articles and what caught my eye is it can build a game on IOs and Android as well as PC and Mac. Hmmm. I know for a fact that Blitz will never have that capability ever. A few weeks ago I was reading up on XCode and just thinking to myself if I ever made a few games would I want to port it to the ipad? I would have to learn XCode which will require a lot of time and effort. For someone that isn't doing this full time and won't be doing this full time for a long time to come, if ever, it probably won't be worth it.

I know the developers of Blitz made a new product called Monkey but hear the syntax is horrible and overall it doesn't really interest me. On the other hand working with Game Maker will be confined to an editor of someone else's making. I'm adamant on not going with Unity, it's 3D orientated and I know I'll have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things to work for me. Using Blitzmax is still a viable option but it doesn't afford me to make a game past the pc and mac.

I'm probably going to do more research and maybe spend some time learning GM to see if it can do what I need. The prospect of making a game for traditional platforms as well as the mobile ones is hard to pass up.