Hi Philip, That has been my concern as well. What seams perfectly easy to a skilled programmer may not necessarily be that simple and straight forward to someone who has no programming skills at all. The only thing I can compare BGT to is the Audio Game Maker tool that was released a couple of years ago which flopped. In design the Audio Game Maker was really simple to use, or at least was to me. You started the AGM up, created a new project, and were placed on a 100 by 100 grid. You then could drag and drop objects on the grid such as enemy objects, the player object, walls, etc. You could point to a certain object and bring up a properties menu that would allow you to configure the objects properties. For the more advanced developer you could ignore the GUI tool altogether and modify the xml scripts directly. However, one thing that became imediately apparent is a lot of people had troubles using the Audio Game Maker. For one thing it wasn't well documented for some users, and they couldn't understand some of the key concepts involved from the get go. For another the team who developed it were college students and pretty much blew the project off after creating it. Which meant no official technical support for the project which was really bad. However, those problems aside I did manage to create a couple of simple games with it and was able to figure out most things on my own without docs or technical support just by experimenting with things. Although, I know a lot of people couldn't. I know with you BGT will be well documented and well supported so those two problems won't be an issue here. However, the question of how fast or quick people will learn how to use it remains to be seen. We've had this situation before with Audio Game Maker and the GMA Engine where people are eager to try the new game development tool only to quickly get frustrated with it and give up on it. My personal conclusion is, and has been, programming games isn't necessarily something for the masses. It is difficult to take a very complex subject like game programming, wich covers many different areas of programming, and package it in a nice little tool that everyone can easily understand and use. You either end up with the totally keep it simple stupid design which lacks a lot of advanced features for simplicity sake, or has every feature you can think of but is too complex for the average user. I'll be interested to see how BGT is recieved in our little community.
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