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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Scrolling Game Development Kit 1.4.0 Released 55

Posted by simoniker from the shadow-of-the-beast-parallax dept.
BlueMonk writes "Hoping that 2D gaming is not dead yet, version 1.4.0 of the Scrolling Game Development Kit for Windows was released at the weekend. It helps beginners as well as more experienced developers create 2D scrolling games. Take a look at some of the games created with the kit while you're at it." It's great to see homebrew 2D game construction supported like this.
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Scrolling Game Development Kit 1.4.0 Released More

Scrolling Game Development Kit 1.4.0 Released

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  • 3D? We don't need no stinking 3D!!
  • So Commodore 64 style graphics is progress, eh?

    Just kidding. This construction set is great. I miss playing side scrolling and overhead adventures like these.

  • So Keen is covered, but anything else? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 2Flower ( 216318 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:09PM (#5834857) Homepage

    It looks like it's ideal for simple platforming games, ala Commander Keen (although every demo screen showed very small playable sprites) or Gauntlet. NES era style, albeit with 32-bit color sprites.

    What about other 2-D scrolling style games, though? I've got a particularly keen (gag) interest in doing a Final Fight / Golden Axe style brawler, but there doesn't seem to be any 2.5D style graphical support here, just Flatland style mapping. Is there a similar project which is more applicable to brawlers?

    • Re:So Keen is covered, but anything else? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BlueMonk ( 101716 ) <BlueMonkMN@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @01:26PM (#5835639) Homepage
      Version 1.4.0 introduces support for larger graphics. So, while most of the existing games use small sprites, the new version supports sprites and tiles up to 128x128 pixels. Even though the maximum size prior to version 1.4.0 was 64x64, many of the games didn't make graphics that large. Hopefully 128x128 will invite the larger graphics and make more people happy with graphic sizes in general. The new version also introduces support for multiple resolutions. Previously, all games were 640x480, but now they can run in 320x240, 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768.
      • Oh, and in reply to the rest of your comment, the kit doesn't support a truly isometric view, but the included Wizard sample game does demonstrate a simulated kinda-isometric view. Rather than effectively offsetting the camera downwards and to one side, it only offsets it downwards. That means you can walk behind walls when your sprite is above (but partially overlapping) them on the screeen, but everything is still aligned to vertical and horizontal lines. You'll also have a problem if your sprite is ta
    • Streets of Rage was one of my favs. You could probably do a Karateka style game.
    • Such 'brawlers' are actually quite simple to program, the hard part is really just creating the artwork.

      For this same reason, I somehow fail to understand the need for such a 2D construction kit. Once the graphics are done, 10% of the code is dedicated to moving sprites around and handling user input, the other 90% is game scripting.

      Maybe I'm just a mean old nerd, but my belief is that if you can't program, you have no business making games. If you have ideas and/or artwork then find a programmer and ge
      • I see it as a stepping stone for young / beginner game programmers. Many game programmers want to make a platform game, but have trouble visualizing how all the pieces fit together behind the scenes. With this kit, not only can they see what makes up a side-scroller at a high level in the IDE, but since it's open source VB, they can even see and maybe understand the code behind it.

        It's also a tool for experienced developers who, maybe, just want to lay out a map and see how their tiles fit together or ho
        • It really has gotten harder to get in, hasn't it? And that nasty programming bug likes to first bite people with the desire to make games (I know that's why me and most of my other software engineer friends REALLY first got into it to do).

          I remember programming simple games in BASIC (and a few in C once one of my friend's bearded dad plus one of my dad's coworkers agreed to teach me how to[respectively, I bugged the hell out of both with questions], but I never really got pointers until years later) back
          • Those who want to program are still going to learn to program. But I think this kind of program just opens up game development to a wider audience -- people who otherwise maybe wouldn't do any development at all. So the intention is not to herd beginning game developers into one way of thinking, but to invite other creative people / artists with ideas to try expressing themselves in this medium by making it generally more accessible.
            • We have ways of doing this already, what you just described is similar to making a map or scenario for any number of games. The problem is, most are too complicated and involved, or insufficient to do what you need them to. I don't run windows, so I can't check this program out and I'm assuming it follows the same trends as all previous programs of it's nature (and from what I can tell from the site as well). Someone care to confirm or deny that?
  • It's GPL. The source is available, anyone up for a port?
    • its also visual basic. I was under the assumption that for now at least its restricted to Windoze. somebody please tell me I'm wrong though - im looking for a way over to linux, and happen to like coding in VB.

      • Re:Linux port anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by BlueMonk ( 101716 ) <BlueMonkMN@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @01:10PM (#5835495) Homepage
        I (as the author) have long been excited about the idea of maybe just porting the runtime engine to another platform, since the runtime engine is a small percentage of the total project, and is the more important piece. Then you would at least be able to play the games accross platforms if not design them on any platform. I would probably have to drop VBScript support for the cross-platform version of the runtime, though, unless someone has implemented VBScript for other platforms.

        Unfortunately I have few of the skills and little time to take on such a project (I haven't done much Linux/Unix programming). I'd be happy to support whoever would be interested in taking it on, though.

      • Re:Linux port anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        vbslacker [icculus.org] is a half complete attempt to get VB working in Linux. Currently has no active maintainer (icculus is rather busy). Feel free to try and help out if you can.
  • Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit on the C64 anyone? God I wasted so many hours of my childhood making games on that. Very tempting to pick up a copy of this and continue work!
    • My friends are knockin down my door, for my new Commodore 64!

      Best commercial ever.
    • My brother and I spent a good few hours doing games on that. I think our favourite was a helicopter based one. Unfortunatly with the limited space for sprite frames I think we didn't have many left after doing the animations for the helicopters. And good old flickering sprites when things got a bit busy....
  • Cool. Is there anything like this out there for OS X? Scrolling games were my favorite .. Crystal Caves was the shit!

  • Here we go again... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:37PM (#5835138) Homepage
    Every time a kit like this is available, we get little gems from people who wouldn't otherwise have the time to learn the skills the kit lets you get away with not knowing - but with them we get hundreds of nearly-identical, pointless games to wade through to get to them.

    Remember pinball construction set?
    • Hopefully the small number of games and the 2 rating systems on the projects listing page alleviates that problem. Each project has an admin and a user rating.
    • I think that it's great. I teach people how to program similar applications and a kit like this might be enough to sway someone into learning the real code and technique required without getting immediately frustrated.

      It's good business.

  • H.U.R.G. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sydb ( 176695 ) <michael@NospAm.wd21.co.uk> on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:50PM (#5835308)
    This reminds me, superficially, of H.U.R.G. [demon.co.uk], an extremely restrictive games development environment for the ZX Spectrum.

    I was going to write the next Jet Set Willy, but I couldn't program (well, I knew BASIC), so I bought this thinking it would be just the ticket (I was only 10...). I can still remember the stomach-sinking disappointment when the reality displaced my golden hopes. I think it put me off the whole idea of games-authoring for life...

    I hope this is better!
    • god, H.U.R.G. and the "jet set willy construction kit" sucked up so much of my time as a kid.
    • I remember spending ages on the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit on the Commodore 64. You could even produce some pretty good little games with that. Naturally you always ran out of sprites or background tiles before you ran out of ideas but it was quite good fun.

  • Physics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bburns ( 232534 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @12:51PM (#5835319)
    It may just be me, but in my opinion the physics model is one of the most important features of a game. Good physics means great control, which makes all the difference between a good game and a great game.

    Take, for example, the difference in physics between Super Mario 2 and 3. Each character in Super Mario 2 had their own funky physics, like Luigi's leg-spinning jump, which was sort of the charm of the game. However, Super Mario 3 had solid physics where you could easily predict where your character was going and send the character where you wanted it to go. I think that's a big reason why Super Mario 2 is a good game and Super Mario 3 is one of the best of all time.

    Anyway, to relate this back to the article, a good side-scrolling game development kit needs a good or customizable physics model. Do many open game development kits emphasize that?

    • Re:Physics (Score:2, Informative)

      by BlueMonk ( 101716 )
      I am glad to hear that because I think the physics model is where the most effort was put in. Sprites don't just have a single hot spot; they check all 4 corners to determine whether they are running into a solid. Sprites that follow paths don't have a pre-set exact path (although that's an option), rather they try to follow the path by altering their current velocity (indirectly) just like the player has to do. And if the kit itself doesn't give you enough control, you can set the sprite type to "script
  • While 2-D platform games do have that retro appeal, I can't help but think that this set of tools would be inifinitely more useful if it were geared towards GameBoy Advance development.

    Unlike the PC, the GBA is a popular platform for this kind of game. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they should drop all work and target the GBA exclusively, but it would be nice if it supported the native resolution and limitations of that platform, and, better yet, could export tile data as assembly files that could b

    • Re:GameBoy Advance (Score:3, Informative)

      by BlueMonk ( 101716 )
      It's open source. It can export to XML. It would be easy to create a program that exports selected pieces of data (or all of it) to practically any format you like. That could be done as a stand-alone program or even as a VBScript that runs in the IDE.
  • Wow I've been looking for something exactly like this...so I can play around with Cinema 4D generated graphics...hmmm maybe we should start a game team :)
  • Great link. Retrogaming is a huge source of fun for me. My only bent is I'm starting to expect that retrogaming be crossplatform (not sure if this is out of any logic, or just the fact that it isn't very hard). I'm sad I'm going to miss out on this linux-land.
  • ...But I prefer using Game Maker [cs.uu.nl], myself. You just have to ignore the mountain of Mario/GTA/Zelda clones the majority of the user base seems to produce...
  • I decided to take a look at it, thinking it looked neat, but imagine my surprise when I discovered that it couldn't run faster than about 3FPS on an AthlonXP 1900+.

    Seriously, this thing must be pretty badly written to not be able to get any better speed than 3FPS on a modern computer.
    • That's odd because it runs at over 100 FPS on my P2 450MHz system. I have found in the past, however, that having the right video drivers is very important -- make sure your video card drivers are up to date and support DirectX. BTW, if you want an exact FPS number, there is an option to turn that display of FPS on. Also, If you were playing ROBOTWARS, I don't recommend basing your judgement of the FPS on that game. Try Rolly the Purple Ball. It runs at a respectable speed.
      • I have the latest Detonator drivers (43.45) for my GeForce 3. They most assuredly support DirectX.

        Actually, I was trying to run both the included tutorial, and the included Wizards game; both ran at unplayable speeds around 2-3FPS.
        • Sometimes the MIDI music can slow things down significantly (both the included games use MIDI music). Rolly the purple ball uses WAV music, which I've found runs at a much more steady pace on some systems. So that game might still be worth trying. As a matter of fact, the biggest complaint on Rolly the Purple Ball was that it ran *too* fast. There is, however, a frame rate limiter control if you think your game runs too fast. So that's not really a problem either.
        • Oh, and there is one other possibility besides MIDI interference. I have noticed occasionally that DirectX gets confused and starts running DirectX (or at least DirectDraw) very slowly. Then everything works better after a reboot. So you might want to try a reboot if you haven't. (BTW, I use the Detonator drivers too, IIRC.)
          • Actually, I have the same problem and I've got the latest Detonator drivers and tried a reboot. Weird. Although I did also just try the GameMaker also mentioned in this article discussion, and its examples also ran impossibly slow. Must be something up with DirectX and these things, my commercial installed games still run just fine.
  • A while back, I used to work on the linux port of a 2d game engine/ide called Sphere [sf.net]. It's GPL, and has a whole crapload of features. It was originally intended for an RPG, but the engine is quite open-ended. (Someone wrote a 3D demo in it, I've done some mockup sidescrolling engines in it, etc.) There are also others in a similar vein like VERGE [verge-rpg.com] and Ika [ikagames.com]. Ika recently got a linux port.
  • It would be interesting to have a multiplayer (over the net) extension to this. Non-trivial I know, but none the lest interesting. Has anyone ever done a 2d scroller type multiplayer game?
    • This has come up many times, and my response has always been that this should be possible through the use of VBScript (no modifications to the engine necessary). VBScript has access to COM, and COM components exist (or can be written) to access network APIs. I just haven't had the time to try this myself.

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