hi tim.
This was tried with audio game maker, and really didn't work out at all. The
problem is even if you wrote a game completely in English syntax, you've
stil got a hole bunch of things to defign.
Take a symple space invaders game as an example.
you first need to setup the playing field as sterrio, decide how much your
character moves according to key presses, have each invader represented by a
sound, have the game track the amount of time it takes invaders to land and
change the sounds accordingly, have your character move left and right and
thus line up the invaders, have a method for tracking shooting to say when
you press a key a shoot sound is pressed, and if pressed when an invader is
not centered you miss, where as if it is centered you hit, have the game
track lives lost when invaders land etc.
thus, even doing this in plane english there is lots of stuff to write and
you just couldn't do it effectively with a sort of question and answer or
filling in form fields, you have to actually write the instructions.
this is what bgt does, it lets you concentrate on writing just the game
instructions. Complications come because you can't quite write the
instructions in plane english but must put them a specific way for the game
to understand.
that's why level editers track editers and the like are so useful. You can
play with the factors in a game without having to setup the hole malarchy
from scratch.
for example, setting up a racing game would require a huge amount of
instructions, about speed and distance and laps tracked and handling and
such, but making tracks for existing racing games like rail racer or top
speed just requires playing with the environment.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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