like more or less everyone on /prog/ (make your're are game nikita), I used to have my game dev projects. unlike most people on here, I tried to get over my autism and do it with other people, which turned out to be a big mistake as the project is now stuck in limbo. this makes me sad
to be less sad, I want to try again, this time without other people because fuck them, they ruin everything. and because I like learning new things (new to me that is, they may be actually old things that modern webshit-oriented industry forgot), I'd like you - yes, you - to recommend me a proglang for my next project.
the vidya I have in mind is something relatively simple and arcadey, but think more 'mid-80s sega superscalers' than 'pac-man'. so I'm gonna need something that allows me to move sprites on screen, scale sprites, handle keypresses, play sound and music, and preferably go full-screen (but with a fixed resolution, it's gonna be oldschool). I want minimal dependencies, simple build process (I'll probably ruin it as time goes on but that's just how it is) and as much portability as possible (source code portability is enough).
the language I'm currently considering is Free Pascal because from a bit of research I've done it seems it can do all the shit I want with no external libraries, plus it has an oldschool appeal, just like the kinds of games I'm trying to rip off here - but feel free to recommend something else. a modern language is ok too, as long as I don't need to ship the game with an entire fucking web browser, because that's just lame.
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Anonymous2018-03-19 17:52
btw I'm not entirely opposed to RAD/visual/low-code engines (although from experience they make the easy thing easier, the hard thing harder and the unusual thing so fucking tedious you have to write code to automate it anyway) but I'd rather avoid proprietary ones.
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Anonymous2018-03-19 17:52
make it in DrRacket
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Anonymous2018-03-19 18:15
>>3 I played around with racket/gui a bit once, but didn't do anything serious with it. IIRC there was no obvious way of putting something at specified coordinatess inside a window, it was all about styles and shit like that. I might be wrong though
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Anonymous2018-03-19 18:55
NESmaker
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Anonymous2018-03-19 19:03
I was thinking of making a game called Scheme Robots, written in Guile Scheme, similar to GNU Robots, but done in a more extensive manner.
>>4 disregard that, I suck cocks. canvas% does exactly that. I'll try doing a simple game loop with that because it might be promising
>>10 lua looks interesting (and I should probably learn it anyway because it's a de facto standard in vidya). does the base language have all the stuff I want or do I need an engine?
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Anonymous2018-03-21 3:20
>>13 Lua has LuaGL (OpenGL bindings) and LuaSockets (for TCP and UDP) as packages/libraries that you can download and use.
What a waste of time. I fucking hate programming. Such inane drudgery unless you’re doing something complicated and new. Making a clone of an 80s game is the exact opposite of fun. Just download fucking Pac-Man.
Also lol at Free Pascal is this nigga serious
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Anonymous2018-03-21 6:02
FreePascal
Michael Jordan laughing.gif
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Anonymous2018-03-21 6:10
On topic, if you really want to make a game, who am I to judge that, so I recommend you use Unity3D and write it in C#.
You have two options: follow any of the recommendations above, try to do everything from Emacs and compilers from 20 years ago and once again never complete your project OR take the shortest path to your goal which is C#, Visual Studio, Unity, and paid artwork.
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Anonymous2018-03-21 6:53
As far as I know gamemaker is written in Pascal, and every successful 2d indie game is made with gamemaker. Also unity is shit engine for shit games, used by shit people that don't care about the craft.
Just use c/c++ like everyone else. If you want to retro use ansi c.
>>14 thanks anon! while I'm currently trying my hand at doing this in Racket (progress report: I've got a fixed-step game loop and functions/classes/macros for manipulating sprites now), I'll probably learn Lua sooner or later because it looks like a really nice (if quirky) language .
>>15,16 what's wrong with Free Pascal? I know that it's a meme that Pascal sucks but Free Pascal avoids most of the early Pascal stupidity and looks like a decent lang.
>>18 it's a learning excercise for me and I already know C. Sepples I'd rather avoid because it looks like an exercise in frustration.
>>19 funnily enough, my other project (the one that is now stuck) uses a Python backend and Ren'Py frontend. but my current idea is arcadey shit, and Ren'Py is not good for arcadey shit.
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Anonymous2018-03-21 22:43
Shitting on Unity is hip, but there's plenty of good Unity games. The reason why people think that Unity is only for shit games is because of their retarded licensing: free version of Unity has the "made in unity" splash, while paid versions (used by any semi-serious project) have it removed.
Unity however can't do "plain" 2D games, it's still 3D engine with all the bells and whistles, so a simple pacman game in Unity will probably require "min 1 GB RAM and Nvidia 8xxx or newer" or some shit, so it might be better to grab Game Maker instead (or Godot if you want something libre)
There's a handful of more low-level stuff that's still not bare bones (SDL, FNA, LOVE, etc.), but without an engine it'll take a while to get to the actual game development. If you're going to write some kind of simple platformer from scratch, you'll spend weeks on physics engine, entity system, resource management, etc. and it's very demotivating. If you want to learn something, go for it, it's good experience, but never do this for a project you want to finish, unless you're on a competent team.
>>21 as I said, it's a learning experience. my semi-serious project is on halt now and I want to pass time and learn things. it's something I want to be able to put on a backburner when I either get back to my previous project or decide to do something different but equally ambitious. finishing is optional and because this is supposed to be strictly a side thing, I don't mind it taking a long time.
as for Unity, I'd rather avoid it here. requirements bloat is one thing, the other is the fact that, as I mentioned in the OP, I'm going for something like superscaler games. those were pseudo-3D games that were actually 2D, and anything 2D in Unity is pseudo-2D that is actually 3D. '3D emulated in 2D emulated in 3D' is an extreme level of overengineering for something like that.
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Anonymous2018-03-25 1:27
>>23 Unity is OK if you're going for cross-platform.
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Anonymous2018-03-26 8:11
>>24 it's not the only cross-platform engine out there and it's suboptimal for 2D gaems
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Anonymous2018-03-26 8:39
Cudder, decompile your're are browser
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Anonymous2018-03-26 18:19
.text alltalkandactionnone: jmp alltalkandactionnone Edited on 26/03/2018 18:20.
>>26-27 what does this have to do with the thread? if I were Cudder, I wouldn't ask about engines and proglangs and I wouldn't use Racket. that's not the Cudder way