Do you program your own video games?

Question

If so, what programming language do you use? Why do you use that programming language? What 2D/3D modelling/animation programs do you use to program your games? What license(s) are they released under? What kind of games do you make? Are you an independent programmer or do you work on a team? Are any of your games commercially available? What are they called? Have you ever written your own game engne? What is the name of it?

Answer 1

I've written games in many languages over the years, including basic (Waaaay back), Java, C/C++, C#, JavaScript, Flash, Python, and a few other languages.



I've written two books about game programming, and several others that included game examples.



Currently I prefer Python, as it's a nice clean language, it's very powerful, it's almost as fast as C, it's easy to teach, and it's available on all kinds of platforms. Python uses the same high-performance libraries as C and C++, so there's very little performance penalty, and you don't have the headaches of memory management you do in C.



I used to do a lot of game development in Flash, but Adobe has not impressed me recently. The language isn't really all that great, and I find it hard to fork out the kind of money they are demanding for CS3 when Python does nearly everything Flash does for free.



The one thing Flash is the champion of is web-based gaming. You can also do this in Java, but Java is kind of difficult to work with compared to Flash and Python.



For 2D graphics, I usually use Gimp (an open-source clone of Photoshop.) Sometimes I'll build 3D models in Blender and take still images of them for use in 2D games.



I generally use Blender for 3D work, as it does nearly everything you can do in Max or Maya, but it's free. It also comes with its own game and physics engines, unlike these tools.



Most of my games are released open source, and are bundled with the various books they were explained in.



I've made plenty of 2D arcade games including web-based and PDA-based games. I've done a little 3D stuff in Blender and VRML - Java, and played around with some of the 3D packages like Panda3D and irrlicht, but I haven't written a major project in them yet. (I'll probably do a book about 3D gaming soon based on one of these environments.)



I have written a game engine, called (wait for it...) gameEngine. It's a wrapper on pygame, which is itself a wrapper for SDL. GameEngine vastly simplifies the process of creating 2D arcade games in Python. It's available at



http://www.aharrisbooks.net/pythonGame



along with lots of notes and examples. You can also see many of my Flash games (in face every example from the Flash book and a few bonus games) at the following site:



http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/flash



Hope this helps you get started.

Answer 2

Yes - I generally make web games so: Java and Javascript. Also i have a 3D Game engine, that has a custom script. Also i sometimes use Game Maker. I use Java & Javascript because they are very easy to use and they are both Object Orientated. I use a couple of programs for modeling, but my favorite one is Anim8or, which is a freeware designed for make Video animations, but exports to common game formats such as 3DS. I use as a level editor the 3D Game Studio, which also has a 3D game engine + the custom script. I havn't released any of my games. I make a variety of games, but mainly: Shooters, Adventures + RPG's. I'm an independent programmer. Once i tried making my own 3d game engine for Online games, but i was trying to make it work like a raytracer, which is to much for a game engine. Right now i'm making a Game Maker which includes an engine at this address: http://www.mogm.5u.com But i havn't released a usuable version yet

Answer 3

Games are written usually by a team of people that includes at least a few lead programmers, graphic artists and testers. Most are written in C/C++ or Flash these days.

Answer 4

I made a game with my Algebra teacher in high school four and a half years ago. It was an overhead RPG that looked like A Link To The Past for SNES. The story we made was so bogus. Unfortunately I had my computer stolen from my car in Wisconsin last year. So the game is gone.

Answer 5

First of all it depends a lot on what exactly you want to do. The first question I would ask is what platform you want to make it for: Windows, Mac, Iphone, Linux, etc. On windows you could use Microsoft XNA for development and c# for coding which is for making games on windows or xbox. I don't really know about games on Linux but for mac/Iphone you would use Xcode for dev and objective-c / OpenGL for coding.

Answer 6

I have. I used C/C++, OpenGL, DirectX. I've also played with Adobe Flash 9 for simple (low-end) games.



Independent contractor.