2014-12-15 04:56:00

I honestly don't know whether or not this falls under the RPG category, but basically, I have a general idea for a game that I want to make, based on a series of novels I've been writing. The premis seems to flourish as a game, at least in my head, and it allows me to be freer with my world-building.

The thing is, I'm also blind, and need a screen-reader-compatible game-maker, and a lot of help getting things set up. I know this will take time, but I have that, at least for now.

One more thing. The program needs to be free. My finances are limited, so I can't buy something. That probably limits my options, but I can hope, can't I?

Any help with this would be sincerely appreciated. This place is amazing, and I'm tempted to just go crazy on all the games I can get my hands on, but I just speed-played a half-finished game from New Releases and I don't want it to take over my life. tongue

2014-12-15 05:20:12

Imaginatrix, off the top of my head you might want to try the Blastbay Game Toolkit, BGT, from Blastbay Studios. It will probably fulfill most of if not all of your requirements for a game building toolkit that is free. There are of course other options out there all of them require learning some sort of off the shelf programming language and tools which you may or may not want to do.

Sincerely,
Thomas Ward
USA Games Interactive
http://www.usagamesinteractive.com

2014-12-15 07:20:21

I've just downloaded and installed the program, but can't use it. When I open it, it says "Select BGT Script", and I'm landed in the files library. I moved to the Program Files X86 section of my computer, and tried to open one of the confirmed BGT scripts there, but it said ""Compile Error Dialogue: Your Script does not define Void Main!" I have no idea what the fractal is going on. I've signed up to the discussion forum over there and hope they will be able to help me. smile This thing looks amazing—I just need to work out how to use it.

2014-12-15 14:25:37

Hello,
If you would like to write a text-based game, I recommend going to the website of a company called Choice of Games. They ahve a free language you can download there called Choice Script. In fact, one of their games, Way Walkers University, was used as a world building starting point for an author, who then went on to develop, and publish, a novel.
If you've heard, on iOs or even on the PC, of ames like Choice of The Dragon, choice of Broadsides, Heroes Rise, Zombie Exodus of Fatehaven, then these are all games developed by this same company. What makes it interesting is if you finish a game and you send it to them, they will probably host it. What most people do is sign up to the forums (I don't know what the new interface is like though), and put their game in the work in progress section for people to test script bugs, check for grammatical errors and generally help you out, and unlike most websites, I've seen no trolling or anything bad go on there. In fact, the community reminds me of this audiogame community right here, these are people who love writing, who want to develop or who just love to play these text games.

2014-12-15 17:00:57

BGT is a scripting language.  You need to write the scripts in a text editor of your choice and then ask BGT to run them for you.
Outside text adventures, there are literally zero options that will let you get what you want and actually look something like RPG Maker or whatever.  If you want a game that does something at all, you have to learn to program. There are no drag and drop tools for this market.  That said, I seriously question if the ones for the sighted are any good anyway-they let you get to a certain point, but then they all devolve into programming anyway, so maybe it's not just us.
Nevertheless the blindness isn't an obstacle at all, at least if you're aiming at other blind people.  Adding graphics is the only thing you can't do without assistance.
Maybe go through the BGT tutorials.  That might give you some idea what's going on.  It covers the language and then covers some game design.  I can probably find better ones, but anything I can find is going to require setting up something which isn't as simple to instal as BGT; if you stick with game design, you'll probably graduate to those tools anyway, but no need to drop them on you when you haven't programmed before.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2014-12-15 19:21:57

Hi
Its good to have a new guy round.
I am one of the designers for reality gaming, I am not sure about state of projects but I know we will be able to help where ever needed.
I have a lot of sfx if I could have access to your novel series I may be able to help nmore.
We use purebasic as one of the languages and a few other things.
we have a 3d engine and a few other things.
purebasic does cost though,  if you need any help I can try, my finances are not that much either but I am willing to fund bits of stuff, languages, and other stuff as long as its not to expensive.
if you are wanting a gamebook the choiceofgames engine is good.
also the language at ffproject.com is good but I have no idea how to get that, maybe by contacting the author.
The advantage of fighting fantasy language is that it does all the automated dice rolls for you.

2014-12-15 19:26:14

Hi, I just skimmed posts 5 and 6 so I don't know if anyone's said this, but the scripts you tried to open were includes, scripts you can, well, include in your game to do various things, you really need to read the tutorials to know what to do with those includes etc. Int the bgt program group in the start menu, go to help.

2014-12-16 00:23:19

Hi, my alternate universe twin!

All my attempts at replicating RPG Maker in audio have failed, because I have the conscientiousness of a wet leaf. (There's no reason someone couldn't just read the manual or a walkthrough for, say, RPG Maker 2000, and write a clone whose focus is on audio, other than some combination of a lack of skill, willingness, opportunity, or action points.)

I'm actually thinking a better place to ease into scripting might be Swamp Campaigns. I'm not sure how good a strategy this is; I started out in the same place, and basically reverse-engineered the simplest Javascript gimmicks I could find (this was way before HTML5) and went from there. Swamp Campaign Scripting (SCS for short) is much more limited, and the syntax is more basic-like (BGT is more C-like, so I'm not sure how hard it would be to go from one to the other if you aren't getting deeper into programming in general). But if Swamp's interface is tolerable for at least one game you'd like to try making, it might be worth trying with SCS (and possibly some audio/language modding for full effect).

SCS can't do anywhere near as much as I want to make (it wasn't meant to!), but I did make FYQuest with it. I was able to implement a crude form of jumping in an unfinished campaign, even, but custom bosses are tedious to make and even more so to fix when they inevitably come out wrong, so none of my other campaigns made it past their first bossfights.

You could play around with the Swamp Map Editor, too. (IIRC Tactical Battle comes with an editor as well.)

The kind of programming it takes to make Audio Skyrim is much more involved. SCS intentionally avoids loads of concepts and gives you a bare minimum (a minimum that is suspiciously more like Assembly than C, in terms of ability set. Shsh, don't ruin the analogy by pointing our how much SCS differs from Assembly; it'll ruin the learning experience!)
You don't get things like loops, arrays, or classes in SCS, but you do get free zombies and weapons (or whatever you want to mod them into), shops, a map format, player characters and allies with stats, and events that you can make do a variety of fun things. You're not even stuck with the FPS format, if you can get creative enough, although you are pretty restricted when it comes to controls.
SCS is available without needing to pay for a Kaldobsky account; the paid account is just for online multiplayer.

But if you can handle BGT already, by all means, do so. The potential is considerably greater, but so is the effort.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2014-12-16 21:36:56

Hello,
RenPy engine is also quite nice for development of a visual novel.

It may also be advantageous to check out
The Builder Academy
for a lovely, hassle-free environment to build Muds.
While you are there, you will be able to network with programmers and you will learn what it takes to get your own distribution of Circle Mud installed on your own server.
(You need VIP Mud to use TBA).

2015-01-04 14:22:21

Well, first of all, I did solve my initial problem with BGT but didn't tell you. I'm sorry! It'll take a while to get the hang of the language, but once I've got a handle on it (I've always had a head for codes and languages) I'll start working on my game!

Although the idea started out as a novel series, the game I'm envisioning (haha) is more of an adventure game. Starting at the beginning you choose one of seven characters and go through a little preliminary stuff with that character (each of the seven has their own separate prologue thing). When the initial conflict kicks off the seven characters come together as a party with some others, and from then on, at certain points, you can jump from character to character and play through certain mini-adventures only that character experiences. The group is split up numerous tiems throughout the plot of the game and so some things will only be witnessed by certain individuals. At times, certain characters will stop being playable for a time for spoilerish reasons, and there will be at least two more playable characters added to the roster as the game progresses. I have lots of other ideas for what I want to happen but I can't work out how to implement what I've just written yet, let alone everything else. It's going to take a while.

Eventually, when I have a completed game, I want to adapt it for a visual audience as well, but the audio components will still be present. I'm even contemplating implementing a feature where you can choose between audio and visual modes so sighted people can play blind. big_smile

I also want voice actors. I loathe the Sapi voice when it comes to reading dialogue in games, and if I can have my characters voiced by actual people and nice cutscenes set up (like in Kingdom Hearts, which is easily one of my favourite games to listen to being played), I would be extremely happy.

2015-01-04 18:35:13

Be ready that this will take like 5 to 10 years if you succeed at all. Since noone else in the world has done such a audio/video game hybrid yet, that should be some indication of the likelihood of such a challenge being realistic or of its difficulty. You would have to be a huge, successful, established mainstream company with about a dozen employees working on this full time if it were to take less time.
I don't mean to be blunt or anything like that, sorry if it sounds like that, I mean it just as a friendly hint based on personal experience in this matter, but I just don't have much time right now. :-)
Lukas

I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.

2015-01-04 19:39:24

I agree with lukas on this one. First of all, bgt doesn't even support graphics. I believe that some people might be trying to adapt that with dlls, but as of right now, your out of luck with graphics as far as I know. As for voice acters, be ready to pay them. Honestly, I would pay for a game that good, but it'd also take you months if not years to develop it with just audio. Not to mension sound effects, and if you are gonna make it payed, you need a reg system that's secure. But it might be not that complicated or more so, I'm not exactly sure as I'm new to this hole thing myself, it just seems like your gonna have to spend a lot of money and time on a game if you want it to be that good.

2015-01-04 21:32:06 (edited by camlorn 2015-01-04 21:39:39)

For a project involving graphics, you'll need a sighted assistant for like 75% of the time you spend on it.  I am assuming you are not sighted.  For a project involving graphics and which can also be described as action, any of the "easy" languages may also give you speed and ram issues, depending on what you are doing.
A project of this size and involving this much art cannot be done alone effectively.  The number of skills you need to know personally and amount of time you need is inversely proportional to how much money you have to pay for things.  Any project I do of this scale, i.e. my so far hypothetical MMO, will certainly involve more than one person.  Even developing your base engine will take a lot of time.  I would anticipate that a project of this size, especially since you want graphics, would cost a minimum of $20000.  If  you don't pay for the art and make it all yourself, we'll see you in 5 years or so-and I'm assuming you can work on this 40 hours a week.
The only counterintuitive thing about all this is that teams of programmers actually become less productive after a point.  If you have the skill to be the lead designer and can figure out how the pieces fit together, you can make your API for each piece up front and then delegate off to them.  There are other coding strategies that work to get things done, but they all typically rely on having something that's far enough along that you're not all trying to pull thousands of lines out of the air.  I cannot tell you exactly where you stop becoming productive as you add new members; this depends on design methodologies, project size, and how "modular" things are.  I.e. an operating system is actually a bunch of programs, so getting a hundred programmers working on it isn't going to cause everyone to start pulling in a different direction.  If you do not know programming, you probably don't want to lead a team; being on one might be beneficial.  A project of this size is going to need what I think of as a strong core: clear, unambiguous, bug-free and extensible engine internals that everyone programming for the project can understand.  If you want to incorporate level designers that need not necessarily know programming (a very, very good idea), you'll also need content creation tools.  There is a reason sighted people like unity or whatever.
Do not take this as "don't do it".  I'm not saying or implying that.  I'm just putting some boundaries on the scope, at least as I understand the project.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2015-01-04 23:44:49

The Imaginatrix, the idea is similar to one I want to work on my self in the future.  Don't let the problems mentioned above set you back.  Rarther use them as inspiration to rise higher.  If you would like any help with coding let me know.  I'm not well known, but I have working in bgt since it started, and I have learned a lot.  Here's to great game.

Want to order food, but can't get out? Try this .
https://postmat.es/Tw5eUTrBn4

2015-01-05 05:18:00 (edited by The Imaginatrix 2015-01-05 09:30:04)

I know I will need help designing the graphics. I don't expect to do that part myself. I'm just going to code the game itself—the story, the maps, the side-quests and all. I was informed that a game created in BGT could have graphics added to it in another program, and who knows? By the time I have completed the audio version sans VAs (which I know I'll have to pay but I'll plan how to cross that bridge when I'm closer to it), BGT may have developed such that you can add graphics while in that engine. I know it's going to take a while, but I do have a lot of time on my hands, and as I said, a head for codes. I just have to get the hang of this script and then I'll make more progress. smile

There are other things I know I will need, including music. That's another thing I know I may have to pay for, but it would be worth it if I had some glorious and appropriate music loops for the various areas of my game.

And there's always this lovely little community to give me pointers and suchlike. I'm not expecting you to devote significant amounts of time to helping me (especially when you've got your own projects) but there's a support network here that I'm willing to learn from. smile

Also, just wondering, if nobody has attempted such a project before, how do you know that it will take five/ten years, Lukas? tongue

2015-01-05 11:09:21

Hi Imaginatrix,

Lukas said noone has completed one yet, not that noone has attempted one.
Everybody wants to make an awesome game, but it is very difficult and very time consuming, much more so than you seem to realize.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but the experienced people here are just trying to help you have realistic expectations.

Anyway, you'll get a better feel for how much work it is after you've spent a month or 2 working on your game, and then the comments here will sound realistic instead of negative.

When learning something new, such as programming, it's often better to start out with smaller goals and work up to the bigger ones.

I like your enthusiasm though, and would honestly love to play such a game built by you or anyone else.
Good luck with it!

~ Ian Reed
Visit BlindGamers.com to rate blind accessible games and see how others have rated them.
Try my free JGT addon, the easy way to play Japanese games in English.
Or try the free games I've created.

2015-01-05 16:00:58

If you truly want graphics, do not kid yourself about bgt.  It may eventually develop to the point where you can do graphics with it, but that's likely to happen if and only if you're the one who goes and adds such support yourself.
But more seriously, the architecture of a game with graphics is radically different from what most audiogames do and what most of the people on this forum advocate.  My suggestion is to give up on the goal of graphics for your first game and just make one, but if you won't, it's best to leave BGT now and go use one of the game tutorials aimed at the sighted.  You're not trying to get the graphics now, you're just trying to get the architecture and "shape" of it now--if you don't have this, adding graphics later will be nearly impossible.
here's a really big hint.  The 10000 line while loop of death? That won't work.  Nor will splitting the 10000 line while loop of death into functions, because you're still reasoning about the whole thing.  The 1000 line while loop of death can be made to work; if it couldn't be, I suspect we'd not have very many games at all.  But graphics adds a huge amount of complexity, and I can promise with a great deal of certainty that this very typical approach is not going to work.  There are better ways even for small games, but big games with graphics go way beyond the point where you'd be able to effectively reason about it.
You'll laugh, but start with tic tac toe.  This is easy, at least if you just make the computer randomly place pieces, and consequently most of the issues are about learning the language.  Tic tac toe that always wins is harder, but might make a good learning exercise in 6 months once you're comfortable with classes and such.  If you're going for turn-based combat, the lessons in a tic tac toe that always ties (primarily the idea of the min-max algorithm) will possibly be of some use.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2015-01-05 21:14:03

Handling graphics is unbelievably complex. I have looked into said topic, and while it can be done, provided you know what you're doing, is by far not practical, especially if you cannot see what you're doing and you're working on said project alone. BGT was meant for audiogames, and I think adding graphics to it's already existing frame would be a lot more work than simply either making a new engine from scratch to support this functionality, or simply using one which already does.
There are several, very easy to use ones that float around the communities. Blitz3D or Blitz Basic, while being old and outdated languages by this point, are extremely easy to pick up and use, even for people without sight. That is, if you know your maths. tongue

Even I, who could in theory bennefit from graphics, do not implement them in my game because it's just too much of a hastle, and limited enough to where I cannot use the development environment of Unity3D.

Making a good game is definitely not as easy as most people think. I do not know how much experience you have in this field, Imaginatrix, however trust me when i say that if you bite off more than you can chew from the beginning, you'll only end up getting frustrated and eventually give up.

As has been suggested many times in this thread, everyone here started off writing simple games, because we all had to start somewhere. Before I got into first person perspectived games I was writing side-scrollers and top-down style games, simply because they could be easier to make, and especially seeing it was audio only, I was able to use many hacks and workarounds that no one would notice. Before then I was making dice and card games. The more you do, the more experience you collect and the more you can do. Practice makes perfect.

This is not to discourage you, merely trying to save you hours and hours of constant frustration.

--
Talon
Wanna play my Games? Listen to my Music? Follow me on Twitter, and say hi~
Code is poetry.

2015-01-06 01:54:42 (edited by CAE_Jones 2015-01-06 03:52:35)

Ahem.

Graphics are hard, yes....
If you're talking good, modern style 3D.
There is a market for sprite-based graphics, it overlaps with the fantasy/KH-style audience quite a good bit, and that particular art style will be the easiest to add to BGT, even starting with an audio-focused framework.

Easiest, but not easy.
I could do it if I had (1) an artist and (2) a pair of eyes. ... Ur, and (3) a wrapper that exposes one of the lighter graphics engines to BGT, and (4) more conscientiousness (that's all I wanted for Christmas, but did I get it? ... That and a bluetooth keyboard, but that's neither here nor there.).

This style game?
Yes, it's a toughy.
No, it's not as hard as people make it out to be.
No, it won't be as quick as you'd like.
And big one: finding people to give you the quality help you need, for things like voices and graphics... that is usually quite hard. Maybe you'll be better at it than most of us, and we'll finally get one of these.

But, let me bring up the JF IM Adventure again. (Yes I hear the groans, for I can hear across the world... And in the future. Maybe.)
It only took me a few months, I think? To put the whole thing together and release the first version (which covered the entire storyline--later releases were bug-fixes and improvements, but not so much on additoonal content). But let me check my files/post history (and edit that in; it'll take a while. ETA: From the creation of the main game file to my first post about it was 6 days, but really I'd been working on it over the past two months in other files).

It built on things I'd made over the previous years, though. The map and character engine came about in 2009 (in between listening to someone playing Kingdom Hearts while I made maps on my PACMate, actually). It draws more than you might expect from a completely different, simpler engine I'd made in summer 2008: I actually converted some 2D characters into 3D for this game. There's something of a loose metaverse, here.

When it came to the game itself, and not background materials, it was quick and simple--something I could do between classes and over the winter break. (The PACMate was a huge help, here. I didn't do much code, other than making characters, but it was great for maps, and I could work just about anywhere. THen I copy them to my main computer, put them in the code, and test and clean up.).

This game is shorter than what you want, I'm pretty sure. In my early test runs, I could finish it in 4 hours; I think I'm down to considerably faster, now (There's one particular section I'm much better at, where I'd made the mistake of leaving narrow areas to walk when you first enter, so there is lots of noise from enemies that you can't really find.). In contrast, Kingdom Hearts was the project of much of the summer (Actually, we never beat it. No patience for level-grinding, so got stuck at Chernabog.).

I'm pretty sure you can manage what you want, and it's much less daunting than it's been made out to be. The Planning Fallacy is still a bitter foe, nonetheless. For all that I blazed through the game I mentioned, I've tried others that were not so successful.
Longer ago, I tried something similar--with multiple characters, each with their own storyline, even. The overall design had problems; I didn't make it realtime, but tried to fake it in places, so it was a mess, and that's just the start. I finished one storyline, and was making great progress on the next, when my computer crashed. My data was fine, but I had been in the middle of working on a map that had taken quite a while to design, that I was rather fond of, even though it was a minor part of the game over all. I kinda rage-quit at that point, then other stuff happened to make the rest of that year unrecoverable. No, I'm not posting the storyline that I still have; it isn't worth the effort trying to make it work today (Trust me, I've tried). But, the important part? Most of the work on that completed storyline was done in my last semester of high school, which was not the lightest semester ever.


While the lack of people and costly resources stings, what really bothers me is my own lack of conscientiousness. If I could have more months--not days, but months--like those? Sure, I'd put out more bombs like the JFIMA, but I'd learn from them quicker.
And you seem to be picking things up much more quickly than I did (unless you have background experience you've kept secret tongue ).

It won't be easy, and it will doubtless come with stumbles and failures, but I think things look much more hopeful than they sound.
Well, for people whose minds still half obey them, anyway.

(Might edit this more later. Have to run, now.)

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2015-01-06 05:10:37

Okay, guys. I see what you're saying. I'm not presuming that I'll pick up all the skills I need in five minutes. I have, however, always been a fast learner. If I love doing something, I pick it up even faster. I was top of my class in School and really good at Maths. And Braille is a code too. I also studied Japanese for several years in High School and loved the language, so I did well in it.

I'm also not above asking for help—I'm no fool. I know sighted folks will have to help me with the graphics, when that time comes, which will not be until the entire audio game is built and tidied up. I would indeed be foolish if I believed I could do this on my own, but I don't. I'm always willing to learn from those more experienced than myself, and hope you will provide the help I ask for rather than criticising me before you know me well enough to make a sound judgement of my abilities.

2015-01-07 10:45:34

Hi,
Maths, Braille or other writing systems in general and languages are not the same kind of code and logic as programming.
Noone is trying to demotivate, insult or criticize you here, I believe, rather we're just pointing out the most likely issues and setbacks that you will simply have to accept and expect sooner or later, whether you like it or not, either by trial and error coming out of experience or by preventive consideration. :-)
My time estimate was more or less, rough, I admit that, but based on what has been seen in the audiogaming community. I've seen other programmers of varying degrees of proficiency, I've done some programing or rather just BGT scripting and web development myself and I've heard many ideas like this one. Believe me that I would be so delighted to play any one of them that my heart would probably explode from all that pressure. But considering that even Shades of Doom took a year or two, I believe, other projects I've been part of as a tester but that I can't talk about in greater detail yet took equally as long or longer or are still being worked on in some cases, etc, all of them being carried out by experienced or even professional programmers, I think you get the idea.
Most audiogame development teams are single guys. In that case for this specific game, you would have to be a decent voicecast and director, sound designer, programmer, script writer, web developer, team director as you would need a team of testers or at least a good strategy and quite a lot of money to pay to other people to delegate stuff to, not to mention the contacts to these good people, etc. Several games have been developed in collaboration of a programmer and sound designer and only about one or two exceptions, such as Top Speed, have been developed by 4 or 5 people where two guys were the main programmers and the rest sort of split up the remaining jobs among themselves, although I haven't yet seen the strict kind of task separation that's to be expected in other, mmore mainstream like teams anywhere in the audiogaming community.
Just my thoughts,
Lukas

I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.

2015-01-07 15:52:35

Yeah. Um.  Computer science and programming?  Think math.  Game programming?  Think computer science and programming plus linear algebra, trigonometry, and possibly calculus depending how crazy you want to get and/or how many libraries you don't have access to because you picked BGT and want graphics.  Programming has absolutely no relation to learning foreign languages--a task which many programmers have trouble with--and braille is a code, technically, but that's not what coding means.
You will not just learn programming.  If you don't believe me, then leave this thread, work through a basic programming tutorial, and then write Tic-tac-toe.  If you do that and go "it's easy" then you have a good chance of beating all of us at programming.  If you do it, manage it, but find it somewhat difficult then you're off to a good start.  If you can't, then stop now.  You will fail if you are your programmer and should find someone to work with you.  Using a tutorial that specifically teaches you how to make tic-tac-toe is not the point; doing that is guaranteed success.  The point is seeing if you can learn the language and put together a program of a couple hundred lines without someone telling you how.  Your game will be around 5000 lines and will use much more complicated concepts, and that's a conservative estimate.
Not everyone can learn programming.  There is some level of innate ability here, just as there is with basically everything else academic.  If you've never touched a line of code, then assuming you can do it is very premature.  Programming is a very interesting combination of logic and math, plus something akin to talking to someone who cannot comprehend nuances and does *exactly* what you say, not what you mean.  As in, "go jump off a bridge" said in exasperation leads to suicide on the part of the other person.  This is a stupid example.  It is also pretty much true.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2015-01-07 18:03:35 (edited by The Imaginatrix 2015-01-07 18:08:55)

...So, nobody is going to help me? I have to just muddle my way through the code and hope by some divine chance I get it right?

When in your experience has that ever helped anyone?

I joined this forum to get support, guidance and encouragement. So far, I have had my intelligence insulted, been talked down to as if I am a small child attempting to climb Mount Everest and generally made to feel lousy. If this is all this community has to offer its newest member I may as well quit the forum and just lurk, hoping to glean something useful from the various threads. I have never felt so unwelcome on an online forum.

2015-01-07 18:42:13

That is an overreaction to be honest. We are just telling you the problems you will encounter, we are not telling you you are an idiot. If you want graphics, bgt is not the way to go currently because graphics are not supported in it. For me, I started with MOO, then after several months tried to learn bgt. I couldn't get the hang of it, struggling with the first examples in the language tutorial for hours. I dropped it for a few months then came back to it before Christmas break and now I know a little of it. Programming's not something you grasp in a few hours. It takes days, even weaks to get to the point where you can develop a small sidescroller. Heck, even I can hardly do that, of course that might be because I don't have the atension span to work on something for long periods of time. Just trial and error with the memory train or windows attack code for a while, make modifications, etc. If your code breaks, that's a lesson in and of itself because then you can ask about that error on the forum or try and fix it yourself and when you do fix it, you think "Oh, that's how you do that." That is just the way I learned, I have no idea if it's gonna be that way for you. When you run into errors with code, we will be happy to hep you. just post a topic with the code your having trouble with and we'll help you. Those are just my thaughts.

2015-01-07 20:32:52

Agreed. No one is calling you an idiot.  I do not think of you as such.  But I'm telling you what programming is, and I am telling you what it is not.  It has no relation to anything you've mentioned in post 20, save maybe math.  But it's not closely related to algebra math but rather formal logic math.
You cannot begin by making this game.  I'm sorry.  I know that's not what you want to hear.  It's going to take 6 months or so before you're at the point of even starting.   You are not memorizing rules.  You cannot be told things.  You're building thought processes.  The only way to build these thought processes is to start with manageable programs and work your way up.  I can show you code all day long.  But unless you're the one writing it, your brain is not building the structure.  The programming tutorials will teach you the language.  They will not teach you how to program.  The articles you will primarily be reading about game design are not going to tell you how yours works, they're going to tell you how the author made theirs work.  They're going to outright contradict each other.  It's up to you to know what you're doing so you can choose to apply or disregard advice.  You're going to make painful design mistakes, and believe me you want to make these painful design mistakes far away from your magnum opus.
We all started where you are.  6 months is the fastest time period in which you can get from zero to the level of coding required, and to do so would basically mean you're a programming savant.  Start smaller.  Tic-tac-toe is not as stupidly easy as you think it is.  Telling you to do tic-tac-toe is not me calling you an idiot, it's me telling you what a good nontrivial intro project is.  There is truly innate ability required, and it's completely separate from any intelligence or lack thereof.  Some people cannot sing. That does not make them stupid.  I'm telling you how to try singing, if you will.  You're not able to know if you can program until you try to program.  And that's all it comes down to.  There is no implication beyond that.

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