I know. I know. Flash sucks. And yet, when faced with the daunting challenge of producing a complete video game each month, where do I turn? Flash.
Here’s the thing: I’m not a programmer. Oh, it would be cool to sling code and grow a beard someday, but given the learning curve and my inability to produce more than sandpaper on my cheeks, today is not that day.
So how does a non-programmer make a video game? With tools, man, tools.
There are lots of programs out there that help us noobs make games. For the One Game a Month project, I looked at three engines I’ve used before:
- Unity – Unity is just awesome. It’s powerful enough to handle full AAA 3d games, but accessible enough that within a few hours, I was able to crank out a complete game of “move a block around the screen.” Unfortunately, the learning curve spikes a bit after that, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to climb it.
- Game Maker – Game Maker is so easy to use, it can be overlooked as a mere kids’ toy. But you can use it to make commercial games, so it’s got some power. I’ve messed around with it in the past, and now that it’s attached to Steam, I’m tempted to go back to it — except that I’ve fallen in love with…
- Stencyl – Stencyl shares Game Maker’s system of menus and drag-and-drop interface to let you make games without actually programming. But it gives you finer control over those elements, and more easily lets you dig into the (gasp!) code itself. But the biggest selling point for me (aside from being more free than Game Maker), is that it exports to Flash.
I know. I know. Flash is the devil. And yet… It’s playable in the browser. This is important, since I’m not going to ask people to download and install an executable to behold my monthly game creations. Also, Flash is (sort of) convertible to HTML5, which means the game can be (sort of) cross-platform.
If you’ve ever thought of making video games, I’d encourage you to try out one of these engines. The basic versions of each of them are free, and there are countless tutorials available.
And you don’t even have to use Flash if you don’t want to.
