Jeremy's XNA Topic (Having Some Trouble)

[JLaCroix]

Edit: I'm having some trouble, check the second page.

So I'm designing a new game, a sequel to Oriontide. I'm not that far yet. All I've really done is plan the story. I've done a few things in Game Maker to get the engine started, but I only spent a few hours so far, because I've not had time for it until now. Anyway, Oriontide 2 will be my last Game Maker game. I can't stand the community and the stupid "rules" they use to govern how games are made.

I bought a few books to start studying what I'm going to do next, and I decided on programming games with C# and XNA. My initial plan was to finish Oriontide 2 using Game Maker, then use XNA full time. (For those that don't know, XNA is Microsoft's game development framework).

So here's the problem. I really want to study XNA now, but I don't have time to make the game in Game Maker and learn XNA at the same time. I could wait to start studying XNA when I'm done with O2, but it's really hard for me to have the XNA books on my shelf and not dive in, it's driving me crazy!

If I start studying XNA now and stop using Game Maker, I'll have to put off O2 until I learn XNA enough to be able to make an RPG, which could take a VERY long time.

If I make the game in Game Maker now, I already know enough to make the game happen, but I'll have to deal with the horrible community who would shun the game if the download size is over 10MB or if it contains a single MP3. The game would turn out awesome, but the community would of course hate it.

Otherwise if I start studying XNA now, I won't be able to make this game until much later. I'll have a huge learning curve to go through, unless I'm wrong.

So what do you guys think, should I abandon Game Maker now in favor of XNA, or should I finish what I started in Game Maker and use XNA later?

I know this may seem like a silly predicament but I'm having trouble deciding on what I'm going to do, so based on what I said, I'm open to opinions to help guide me to a better decision.

Even though you don't have to have game design experience to offer suggestions, I'm also open to opinions from those that have experience in XNA, such as if an RPG is even feasible with the system.

So, XNA or Game Maker?

[orius]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

Just make what you want and let the whiners stick it.

[Alzar]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

I played with XNA today. It's total ezmode dude.

To elaborate, if you haven't used the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE much, it's quite nice and does a lot for you. XNA was super quick and easy to setup, easy to connect to my XBox 360 and I went through the beginner tutorials in a couple hours and mucked around and made some games. C# is like a super easy language.

Also IMO Game Maker is pretty lame.

I wish XNA was around when I was younger and had more time...

[Jamos]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

Joined the GM community a few months ago and yup, it sucks. I was barely given any decent advice or anything, so I got out of there.

Honestly, it depends on which one you can leave set a while. I generally say it is a good idea to stick with an idea that is fresh in your head before it gets deluded with time. So I can't really tell you which to choose. It is all about what you want to accomplish first.

[madcopper]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

Or RPGM2?

[JLaCroix]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

Just make what you want and let the whiners stick it.

That's a good thought.

I played with XNA today. It's total ezmode dude.

To elaborate, if you haven't used the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE much, it's quite nice and does a lot for you. XNA was super quick and easy to setup, easy to connect to my XBox 360 and I went through the beginner tutorials in a couple hours and mucked around and made some games. C# is like a super easy language.

Also IMO Game Maker is pretty lame.

I wish XNA was around when I was younger and had more time...

I really enjoy the C# language already. My main question is that it may be easy like you said, but what about designing RPG's? With what you know since you've been using it, do you think that's feasible?

Joined the GM community a few months ago and yup, it sucks. I was barely given any decent advice or anything, so I got out of there.

Honestly, it depends on which one you can leave set a while. I generally say it is a good idea to stick with an idea that is fresh in your head before it gets deluded with time. So I can't really tell you which to choose. It is all about what you want to accomplish first.

I cuncur, but you don't have to worry about my ideas deluding over time. Quite the contrary. Some of the stories I came up with were thought up several years before they surfaced.

Or RPGM2?

Nah. While I respect the Playstation RPG Makers (I think that's what you're referring to), I want a larger audience. PC is the way to go for me.

[MRevelle83]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

The closest game I ever made with Game Maker is a virtual manual for Mencara Revelle that was not finished. It will be in the future, but like hell I will make an actual game with it.

[JLaCroix]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

The closest game I ever made with Game Maker is a virtual manual for Mencara Revelle that was not finished. It will be in the future, but like hell I will make an actual game with it.

I found Game Maker to be very flexible with what you can do with it, although for RPG's there's quite a bit of overcoming the system that you have to do. The main problem with Game Maker for me was how anal the community was about everything. If you use MP3 music, many will hate it. If the size of the game is over 10MB, many will hate it. Those rules totally limit your creativity. What if you wanted to make a 500MB extremely long epic RPG? Sure, that's unlikely to ever happen with Game Maker, but you should be able to if you want to or think you can.

The saddest thing is that those people that are complaining about download size are probably 56k users that are downloading America's Army in another window. It makes no sense.

[Toaster]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

The Game Maker Community sucks. The Game Maker product, doesn't.

It's a pretty powerful tool, if you know what you're doing.

[Alzar]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

I really enjoy the C# language already. My main question is that it may be easy like you said, but what about designing RPG's? With what you know since you've been using it, do you think that's feasible?

I mean, yeah, I don't see why not. There aren't any currently out to compare against but there's some pretty advanced platformers and such. No reason why you couldn't make an RPG.

You should though read this first: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/faq

There's a whole approval process type dealie you have to go through to get your games posted on XBox live if that's something you'd wanna do, that kind of stuff might turn you off from it. *shrug*

i also dont know how to share games at this point, haha

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

I would think to share the game the other person would have to have the XNA Game studio and a way to connect to their X-Box and then they just build and deploy your solution. Only other way would be to actually put it up on XBLA (at which point it would likely need to be finished). Unless you built it for Windows, then I would imagine you just sent the exe.

I really should mess with XNA more, but I think it's pretty easy to work with, and if you have any experience with C# I would go with it. XNA 3 even works with VS2008, which adds a lot of nice features over 2005. Since you're not doing a lot of 3D more than likely it should work pretty well (I think DirectX or OpenGL are still a better choice for doing high end 3D games).

I think the learning curve would be similar to GameMaker, especially since XNA has a lot of tutorials projects to look at. Only issue is you have pretty much no premade assets (3D/2D models, music, etc), though looking through the community you might find some. If you are serious about making a game though I would go with XNA, since it would be very easy to get your game out both on XBLA and PC. Of course I've never touched GameMaker so really can't say much about it. But from my short musings with XNA, it seems pretty straight forward, though of course it's more a full blown game framework as opposed to a scripting engine.

[Perversion]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

So, wait....does one need to buy that $99 a year XNA subscription in order to "muck around" with the software, or can you DL it and play around with it for free? I was under the impression that in order to both make games using the software AND submit them online, you needed to pay $99 a year.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

If you want them to play on the XBox then yes, you have to have the $99 subscription, however if you just want to use XNA to develop windows games, then it's completely free. Essentially the XNA product addon to Visual Studio is free, but the ability to deploy your projects to the Xbox and put them on XBLA costs $99 a year (though once they are on XBLA, maybe you don't have to keep purchasing the license, I'm not really sure).

Here are the full details, http://creators.xna.com/en-US/faq#anchor_1_2 . It also looks like you can't currently submit games that would be free to XBLA. But like I said, developing for Windows/Zune is free, and would require nothing on the users side.

[Alzar]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

2 things:

1) They have a starter kit for RPG Games: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/starte...oleplayinggame

2) Here is the sample 3D game compiled on my computer (its bare bones, mind you): http://www.under-rated.com/Debug.zip

All you need to play it is the XNA 3.0 runtime: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en


Truecoolness, you should definitely play around more with XNA! I think it's pretty sweet. Though I haven't played with it long. Maybe the RPG Maker community as a whole can play around with it and make some neat stuff. Who knows.

JLaCroix, I mean it seems like a no brainer to me, if you want to program. I'm mucking around with it to stay sharp and be creative and learn new things as a programmer (even though I work professionally in software, I don't really get to do much that is creative, mostly bug fixes at this point. But whatever). Again, I haven't touched Game Maker, but the "Do you want to develop computer games without spending countless hours learning how to become a programmer?" mantra turns me off from it from the get go. If you want to code a bunch with an industry used language that is similar to other industry used languages, I wouldn't waste my time with Game Maker.

Game Maker sounds like its for kids? At least from the community aspect. I think XNA is aimed toward like college kids, or smart high schoolers.

[JLaCroix]

Re: Need some advice, about game design. (You don't have to have experience to answer

2 things:

1) They have a starter kit for RPG Games: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/starte...oleplayinggame

2) Here is the sample 3D game compiled on my computer (its bare bones, mind you): http://www.under-rated.com/Debug.zip

All you need to play it is the XNA 3.0 runtime: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en


Truecoolness, you should definitely play around more with XNA! I think it's pretty sweet. Though I haven't played with it long. Maybe the RPG Maker community as a whole can play around with it and make some neat stuff. Who knows.

JLaCroix, I mean it seems like a no brainer to me, if you want to program. I'm mucking around with it to stay sharp and be creative and learn new things as a programmer (even though I work professionally in software, I don't really get to do much that is creative, mostly bug fixes at this point. But whatever). Again, I haven't touched Game Maker, but the "Do you want to develop computer games without spending countless hours learning how to become a programmer?" mantra turns me off from it from the get go. If you want to code a bunch with an industry used language that is similar to other industry used languages, I wouldn't waste my time with Game Maker.

Game Maker sounds like its for kids? At least from the community aspect. I think XNA is aimed toward like college kids, or smart high schoolers.

Thank you, I'll check out those things that you mentioned later. I've heard about the RPG starter kit, but I'm cautious because it seems that using it is kinda frowned upon in the industry, like this guy for example.

All in all I'll probably go right into XNA. Game Maker is a VERY good tool though, the only problem is the community. I made this RPG with it from scratch, and although it isn't amazing, I'm proud of it. (You don't have to have anything installed to make it work).

But yeah, I'll have fun with XNA, I'm sure. There are several books I want to get, but I ran out of money. I'll just go through the books I have and see how far I get.

Thanks everyone!

PS. I'll probably just make some BS games to start out with.