Well, Ken. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Its less a matter of blind gamers being able to come up with decent game
ideas, but more a matter of converting those ideas into code. I think
the reason for this is the lack of professional training. A lot of
amateur developers download free instructional material from the web,
perhaps look at some sample games, but they aren't getting step by step
training in programming.
For example, most programmers when they take college level courses start
out with a class on pseudo code. The purpose of that class is to teach
new programming students how to logically construct programs, to design
an outline for his/her program, and to get an idea of how a program
works. Once a new programmer learns the basic logic taught in those
classes that programmer is ready to move onto the simpler languages like
Python. Unfortunately, I think what happens is this essential step of
learning the logic behind programming gets lost and some blind game
developers try learning a language without fully understanding how it
works. Therefore they aren't able to convert ideas into code.
For example, you said you aren't sure how to create map files. So let's
look at this step by step together and see if we can break it down into
some very logical steps. Then, convert those steps into actual code.
To begin with let's ask the question, "what is a map?" Well, a map is a
flat 2 dimmentional image of the game world. You can think of it as a
game board broken up into rows and colums of squares that need to be
filled in with data. Basically, its just a table containing the location
of rivers, mountains, walls, and whatever else you want to add to your
map. So how do we create a 2d table in programming?
Well, easy. We use a 2d array of course. Then, we fill that 2d array
with specific information of where castles, maps, rivers, bridges, and
everything else is by saving that information to the x and y location in
the array.
For example, if we have a 2d array called map and we want to add a
castle to (5, 5) on that map in Python we could do something like
map[5][5] = "castle"
which just added castle to the center of our map. Now we want to add
mountains to the north end of our map like this
while i < 10:
map[i][9] = "mountains"
i++
which would add several mountins to the top of our map.
Once we have created that map we need to save it to a file. In most
programming languages we would convert that array to binary, something
called serialization, and then save it to a dat file. If we ever need to
reload that map we deserialize it, convert binary data back into a
string array like above, and then can use it for loading and saving
different map files. This is essentially how all the level map files
work in my game engine. It just deserializes an array of walls, doors,
traps, whatever and I check the array to figure out where this or that
is in relation to the player. its a very simple concept in practice, but
unless someone has been taught to think of arrays in that way they might
not ever think of using them for 2d maps.
Of course, there is a more professional way of handling maps and that is
by using collision detection. You create an object, asign it an x/y
location, and then calculate the distance and direction to that object.
If they intersect a collision occurs. However, as bounded boxes is
beyond the scope of this message let's just say there are multiple ways
to handle map files.
Anyway, I think that is the problem most audio game developers have.
They don't know the logic behind how this or that works so aren't able
to convert ideas into working code. They might not even know the
language as well as they think which would compound the issue. The key
to being a good programmer is knowing the language very well and
understanding how each and everything works in it.
As to the issue of Fraze Madness. Unfortunately, that is another side
effect of being an audio game developer. Some games do fairly well and
others don't do well at all. Since we are dealing with a very small
market the games that don't do well end up with only a handful of sales
making it barely worth the effort of developing the game. You aren't the
first person who tried to sell an audio game only to find it wasn't a
commercial success.
Cheers!
On 3/27/2012 11:03 PM, Ken wrote:
I know that for me, it's not the lack of ideas, but rather the lack of
the mastery of programming. I really wish I could get a look at a
game like swamp and learn, for exmple, how to have the game
incorporate map files and so on. Another problem I am having is with
AI. I understand fuzzy logic and was using it way before I even knew
about it, but programming AI isn't as simple as just thinking how it
should behave and writing it down, you've got to code in such a way
that it does what it's supposed to.
Finally, my last barrier is that no one buys my games. I thought
Phrase Madness would be a big success, yet it's only seen five
buyers. To me, the ability not only to make new and funny phrases,
but also to be able to comment on them and upload those comments made
the game unique, as well as the fact that it could be played on a
windows mobile device, but nobody was all that interested. Oh well,
maybe I'll have better luck with Space Attack--if I ever getting
around to finishing it lol.
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