Game Maker, XNA/C#, or other??

Posted by Alert Games on Feb. 5, 2012, 11:26 p.m.

I know that most people here know or remember how to use Game Maker here. But I'd like to know what you guys want or like to develop in, especially if there is a collab or something soon.

Right now I only know game maker in terms of developing games in. At first I was thinking about picking up C++, but I heard that C# is probably better nowadays for applications and games. Plus, XNA seems pretty cool so i'll probably try and get into that when i have time.

So yeah what do you prefer yourself to use for your projects, and

what are you willing or suggest to use in a collab project?

The collab project may or may not be a big deal of a game, but that depends on what we would like to do. I think we outta use something that everybody can know that wants to contribute, but if everyone wants to try out a more professional approach that would be cool too. Plus, getting XNA and visual studio is free if you go to a registered university.

Interested to hear your guy's thoughts on this. thanks :D

EDIT: I think it would be cool to do the dubstep collab because of the expirementing with many flashy effects and sync to the music. This may be done in GM as it would take a lot more to get used to those things in C#.

I also hope that wouldn't be tooooo long of a project so that we can move on to either new collabs or competitions ;)

Comments

Astryl 12 years, 9 months ago

Personally, I use C++ with SFML as a development base.

For a collab though, I'd partially recommend C# + XNA. I can't bloody use XNA or C# though, because of Microsoft's ridiculous web-installer setup. And my PC isn't connected to the internet…

Alert Games 12 years, 9 months ago

@Mega: Yeah they just changed that around recently :/ Im guessing to make it easier to install that mounting it or burning it i guess. Though I think they have ISO's available for visual studio10 if you needed that. C# you can run through VS10 right? Just not XNA.

Thanks for your comment ;)

Cpsgames 12 years, 9 months ago

C#, and for team collab set up a Team Foundation server or use dropbox.

C# is pretty easy, I managed to pick it up without much help pretty quickly, it is a lot different than Game Maker though but thats the beauty of it! Start tearing into tutorials, examples, and open source software in C# and see how those bitches tick. You'll be coding something with it in no time ;)

Astryl 12 years, 9 months ago

I'm not wasting my time downloading a 700mb ISO of the whole Visual Studio package. I'd rather wait until I connect my PC to the next later this month and install directly.

Alert Games 12 years, 9 months ago

@CPS: :D Yeah I think dropbox is pretty good, but the lack of priv's bothers me. Team Foundation seems like a bit of work to use right… I've never used it.

@Mega: well, 700mb isnt too bad for the global average download speed. but yeah you might as well wait until its connected.

sirxemic 12 years, 9 months ago

XNA has its limits, though they could be resolved by using extra DLLs, I guess. Especially sound analysis for the dubstep thingy would require a component that is efficient, so that would presumably be programmed in C++.

For collab you could just use SVN or Git.

Castypher 12 years, 9 months ago

XNA is built for game design, but knowing how to create games from scratch is a good skill too. I'd personally recommend XNA, because I don't want to write SpriteBatch code myself. And even so, XNA is a big step up from Game Maker.

JID 12 years, 9 months ago

I want to learn XNA one day and by one day, I mean soon.

umbra 12 years, 9 months ago

How similar are C# and C++

Alert Games 12 years, 9 months ago

@umbra: Very similar. If you look up "C# vs C++", you can see a list of differences. C# is a tiny bit more limited to what it is intended for.

Sounds like people are pretty interested in XNA. I think we may want to start a collab project in it to motivate everyone to get some expirience in it D: