They say that life is what happens when you're making other plans, and that certainly rings true as I sit down to tap in a Blog entry after a hiatus of almost two years; more incredibly, it's almost ten years since I started this Blog back in July 2004, as I searched for a programming language to create a game and satisfy my creative urges.
The programming language was Blitz+, and the project I had in mind was a remake of Martin Walker's seminal Commodore 64 title, Citadel (not to be confused with the BBC microcomputer game of the same name). The search for a decent map/level editor led me to create my own, and thus Citadel took a back seat for two years while I worked on FishEd, a map editing tool of which I am immensely proud.
During that time, of course, new languages came out, including Blitz Max, and thus Citadel was again on hold until I had mastered this new language (during which time, thoughts of re-writing FishEd in Blitz Max once again pulled me away from the process of actually writing the game).
And of course, one needs to throw life into the mix: during those ten years, I got married, moved to Canada, lived and worked on a horse farm, started two new businesses, got divorced, went to university, relocated from the West coast to the East coast of Canada, started a new career in radio/broadcasting, and got married for a second time.
It's no wonder that poor Citadel had to take a back seat for so long.
Fast-forward ten years from 2004, and games development is a generation or two removed from what it was back then; the iPhone was just a germ of an idea; there were no app stores; Steam was a fledgeling platform that nobody thought would grow or survive. Most importantly, if you wanted to make a game, typically you had to learn a language and do things the hard way.
One constant remains, however: I still want to remake Citadel.
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When I recently looked at the array of tools at my disposal, it dawned on me that though the potential was huge, the choice just as overwhelming as it was back in 2004 (this is partly my fault: as soon as I have to choose between two or more things, my brain goes haywire). However, I'd like to think that I've matured and grown since 2004, and thus I arrived at a final decision fairly quickly: Game Maker Studio, which narrowly beat Unity to the finish line.
I won't bore you (too much) with my thought processes, but essentially GMS appealed to me for a number of reasons:
- I can create the game and edit the levels all in one package, giving me more focus.
- I was able to boot it up and get results in minutes; Unity's initial learning curve had me struggling to just load an example project without tearing my hair out.
- It's as simple or as complex as you make it; the in-built actions and events make it easy to rough out game mechanics, which you can later refine by adding code as you learn.
- I can output to a variety of different platforms, including HTML5, Windows, iOS, etc.
Last week, after Game Maker Studio had sat on my hard drive for months, something started nagging me to begin using it, so I stole some hours here and watched some excellent tutorial videos put together by Shaun Spalding (you can find his YouTube page HERE). Today, I spent an hour creating this:
An hour. One hour. Including the time it took to convert the graphics into the correct format. Flushed with this success, I was certain that Game Maker would be the package of choice to put together a remake of Citadel. Finally, after ten years, things seem to be happening.
