I'm a programmer by nature and lack skills in art & music. I'd love to hop in, but I'm not a newbee to programming. It also kinda depends on the platform you'd be using, since I'm familiar with most regular languages but not the custom ones like GameMaker & RPGMaker use...

Originally posted by Wolfgabe:

Just so you know I have no experience in writing actual code whatsoever so I am basing my decision off my current skill level

I still would recommend Unity3D then... You can make games with drag & drop and a lot of (free) items in their asset store that'll make your life a lot easier. One of the assets I really could recommend is PlayMaker[www.assetstore.unity3d.com]. Though not free, it kinda allows you to drag & drop anything you want and allows you to UI as tool for what happens to stuff.

Also it's worth to to take a look at Unity3D becasue it's totally free and the online tutorials are very well made...

Please add Unity3D (http://www.unity3d.com) as free game dev engine as well

Originally posted by ZaMi (inDev):

Create: counter = 0
step: if counter > 0 { counter -=1}
mouse_left_pressed: if(counter == 0) { instance_create(x,y,obj_bullet); counter = 60; }


that works, but thanks anyway :)

NEVER USE COUNTERS AS TIMERS! Better use CPU time instead.

Not sure what OP is programming in, but all C-dialects have a time method (time.deltaTime in C#) to calculate time passed between cycles.

You mean something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk51FMUFuQg
Made it with unity with a minimum of coding where I basically check the controller movement and layer the sprite is on to determine movement.

Thanks for the invite guys. Didn't know about this group or I'd probaly have joined it already ;)

I'm an old-school and auto-didact programmer started back in '84 (when I was only 14) on the 8bit homecomputers. In '86 I bought my 1st machine (Atari 800XL) and made a couple of small (BASIC) games on it, including a text adventure with 10K locations (try to push that in only 32kb ). I also experimented with ASM on the it, but mainly used it to hack games on the 800XL (with some success...)
Moved on to PCs in '89 and Pascal a year later. Running a BBS at the time I made a couple of tools I needed, including a FidoMail convertor and a file manager (the latter one in C under OS/2 BTW).

From the period of 1994 to 1998 I haven't been too active with PCs in general (bad relationship, shit happens) and around the turn of the centuri I picked programming up again, to may a full-fledged administrative application for my own debt-collecting agency (that used to be my main line of work), which I wrote in Pascal. The database I used for it was also based on the Pascal file system. This application I have maintained until 2004 (when I iended the agency) and I got addicted to Lineage II the enxt year and played it VERY intensive (no time to program anything at all).

Time went by, I got older and the itch to start programming came up again. We're now in 2008 and I realized that old-school BASIC/Pascal would not cut it anymore. Not sure where to start, for the first time in my life I decided to take a course in 'modern day programming': PHP/MySQL. I've been working on HTML a lot in the past then, but had no clue how to manage databases (figured PHP would be easy and it was). The exam for this course was to make a weblog application, which by now I have extended to a full service (though using only for my own blog...)

Around 2012 I felt that the blog service was somewhat complete and looked for something more 'serious' and ended up with Unity3D (version 4.1 at the time) where in one year time I made my first (and so far only) android game: TetraGems. This game I developed more as an experiment to see how OOP worked and multithreading in games worked.

Right now I have 3 projects running but sadly lack concentration to work on them:
1. Burst-a-Bubble - this is a game mixing Bust-a-Move/Bubble Bubble with sliding games. I doubt it'll be worth to be released on PC, but I will one day complete it as an Android game.
2. Droid Quest - this game was my 1st attempt at a 3D game based on the old (MSX) Eggerland. It'll be a puzzle/maze game.
3. d20 project - I've always loved pen-n-paper RPGs and have always wanted to make my own RPG and I need the rule set for it. With this project I'm coding the full d20 (D&D 3.5) ruleset for Unity/C#.

At this moment reading Blender for Dummies to learn how to make beautiful 3D objects for both the Droid Quest project and the RPG I want to make.


Lack of concentration I mentioned this above... I suffer from a rare combination of Asperger Syndrome and ADD. I've tried medication to control the ADD but sadly I'm allergic to chemical medication in general and that also applied to the ritalin. Because of that my brains go haywire quite a lot and I lack focus on almost anything and sleep extemely bad, waking up a couple of times a night (as a result at home with a disabled allowance ).

IMO better start with Unity3D for MANY reasons. One is that (up to $10K) you can use it for free with some very small limitations, after that you have to buy it for a mere $1500 (for Win/Mac/Linux). Secondly, Unity3D uses C# and Jscript as language, while GM uses it's own script, making a follow up into 'professional development' a bit harder (ie when using Unity to script you can hop more easely to Unreal because it uses C++). Lastly Unity allows you to compile for Windows, Max & Linux along with Android & iOS in the free version with only a startup logo, while GM only allows regular Windows to be compiled to with a HUGE watermark in it...