The game has changed …

So a lot has changed since my previous post.

Tony decided that Unity was not working for him, so he threw his toys out of his big, big pram =)

If I am honest, I spent around six months playing with Unity, occasionally having eureka moments but, more frequently than not, having @#%& moments.

Firstly my pet hate in programming languages is C# – C Sharp. I never ever managed to get on with it. This started when studying for my HND and has carried on ever since. I have previously worked with other forms of C, C++, Pro-C, Visual C and Objective-C without any issue.

I found the Unity interface hard to get on with but it slowly grew on me, and I had also started to get some simple, impressive things working. In short, it was starting to grow on me.

To illustrate, I spent quite a lot of time trying to get all my TileMap systems to work in Unity, with varying levels of success.

For last 5-6 months, I have been following Mike Daily (@mdf200) making good old classic Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga games using this thing called Game Maker?!? I had never heard of it but, after watching several YouTube streams of Mike making Jetpack, Pole Position, Boulderdash, to name just a few, it slowly got me wondering…

I’d mentioned to Tony about Mike doing these games in sometimes just a few hours, or sometimes a whole day, and he too was impressed after seeing some. Around this time I had also tweeted Mike about various aspects of the Game Maker Studio 2 Beta. He’d been showing off some of the new features like Tile Mapping and editing sprites in the game. The idea of trying GMS 2 thus became more and more attractive to both of us, despite the fact that it was going to cost around £100 each. The only major drawback for us at present is it’s currently only on Windows (spits feathers). This left us with the option of either getting out old PC’s or creating Virtual Machines. We tried both – my PC is about 6 years old and, at the time it was pretty much as good as you could get back then. But trying it with something like this now and it pretty much ran like a dog with no legs! =( Tony had some more success for a while until his machine overheated and went pop! So we resorted to putting Windows on our shiny iMacs using Parallels Desktop.

To illustrate how effective development actually is using GMS 2, after a month I had managed to get to more done than i had with Unity over 6 of them.

So it’s looking like GMS 2 is here to stay on PC emulation. Until its available on Mac, anyway.

And better still Paradroid is moving on leaps and bounds. More on that soon!