Getting close to asking for a FULL refund! >:-|

#1 I noticed that you have the platformer kit. Why are you going through the ninja tutorial when you could be using something that solves a number of problems and is documented?

#2 I'm guessing I figured out the problem to the ninja not appearing. I unchecked and rechecked the visible checkbox and it's working now. I just don't understand why I have to jump thru hoops like this.

I'm doing the ninja tutorial cause I figured I should look at it to understand TGB better. I did the psk tutorials and they were a bit lacking in some areas. There are quite a few things like shooting, punching, kicking, and the like that I want to add to the PSK but there are no demos or tutorials about that and all the other tutorials, such as the shooter, go about the coding and scripting completely different from the PSK. So I figured I may not even use it.

I really don't know anything except that I'm getting really angry at this toolset.

#3 Did you sit down with the trial and go through the tutorials?

#4 Have you gone through the other tutorials? TGB Documentation. The official docs and the tuts listed on the page are the most up to date. The Ninja Tutorial has not been touched in a long time.

#5 @sqldbatx: Welcome to game programming. :)

Even with an editor, tools, tutorials, documentation, and more, you're still going to have a lot of trial and error. There's simply no way around it.

My advice is to lower any expectation of immediate success. Just keep working at it and you'll slowly build up an instinct about all the quirks of the tools. Eventually, you'll get into a groove and start being productive.

#6 You know, it's the small things that really anger me. The fact that I buy something and its full of bugs. I find a thread in the forum about a codeblock using spaces instead of TABs and that at least got me looking in the right place. My file was NOT ok in the demo but it also was NOT ok in the template. I ended up having to merge the two together to make things work. I had to do this on my own and it's something I should expect to be functioning out of the box, as it's part of a tutorial.

Furthermore, the tutorials show me how to add animations for shooting but they don't go as far as showing how to add bullets?!? The game documentation is either buggy or extremely lacking and if that isn't enough, the forums appear to have almost no one reading them, so how can I get support or help for PSK issues? I'm very disappointed.

#7 You shouldn't have expected a plug-and-play, snap-in, "make a game in five seconds" system.

As for your issues with the "files you had to merge", I have one word for you (well acronym, really):

PEBKAC.

#8 No need to be a douche, Kenneth.

1) The garage games website markets TGB as if it is 99% plug and play.
2) PEBKAC - dude that's so 1997. If you can't say anything nice then don't speak. This is my exact problem with TGB. The product documentation and tutorials are lacking and/or broken. Then when a person from the community speaks up he is negative.
3) The PSK demo is broken. The templates are broken. It's not PEBKAC.

So again. Don't be a douche and keep your negative comments to yourself.

#9 When I first stared using TGB I wanted to make my game I had been dreaming up in my head for years. Well, that didn't happen, because I couldn't figure out how to do the simple things, much less the complex ones.

So... I completely forgot about my awesome game idea and just made a remake of "reflex".

Then I think I made pong, tetris, packman, and then bomberman. I literally thought of the ultimate simplest game that I could almost see how to "code" - then I just had to learn the "TGB way" to do it. Then another very slightly harder, etc etc...

Learning by doing is the best way, some would say the only way, but you are always in danger of overextending yourself and burning out...

#10 @sqldbatx
Game development is hard; and TGB requires developers to learn at least scripting to be able to develop the core logic for their games. Someone else may make a behavior for doing something; but unless you can script, you're not going to be able to modify it to work for your game--at least not reasonably or on a level that you would feel comfortable supporting.

There is no easy solution to making your game. Some tools will make it easier; and TGB's interface makes laying out objects, tilemapes, etc much easier than if you were cobbling together tools and trying to write your own editor.

However, from your forum demeanor, I am not amazed that people aren't answering your topics. You have been demanding without seeming willing to learn the basics. You have made this topic. Had you evaluated the engine for its trial period, you would have learned that it requires programming to make a game. Even the best games in GameMaker use GML or custom DLL's.

You seem to be ranting about the dip, as Seth Godin calls it. That long slog when you realize that game development (or becoming a pro athlete or a CEO) is work. Just as art does not draw, paint, or sculpt itself, applications do not program themselves. We can make it easier, but right now you're beating your head against the hard parts: learning an engine, how things click, etc. You are jumping around the documentation because you have a target in mind, but are not settling down to learn the basics so that you can hit that target.

It seems with this rant that you are realizing that there is a learning curve standing between you and your game; and that curve is bigger than you want it to be. So you blame the tools, the docs, etc. No engine is perfect. No documentation is perfect.

If you've read the Flex documentation, you'll probably agree that it is well-written and complete. But there is next-to-no point-a to point-b learning in most of it. Adobe did a good job, but there are a whole host of learning sites and books dedicated to filling the niche their documentation left. Their doco is great for people who already know Flex or ActionScript or are coming from other web languages, but the learning curve is steep using the base documentation for it.

What I find most interesting about this rant is that you haven't answered any questions about the trial process. What made you convert to a sale? Did you download it, go through the tutorials that you are now ranting about, and think "YES! I must have this engine?" And plop down your money?

Philip is around the PSK forums quite often and the TGB forums are busy as well. There are a lot of games made in TGB; many from people who have started learning to program with TGB and have successfully hit big portals with their games. But they also were willing to sit down and learn how to make their game effectively with the tools at their disposal. Game development is not an insurmountable task as long as you want to do it. It take a ton of hard work, and you have to get through the dip.

#11 I do believe I answered that at some point in some post somewhere. I did try the trial and you cannot purchase the PSK or download it without first buying TGB. I figured the PSK would have much better documentation and more functions. The only bugs I found during the 15 or so days that I tried the TGB trial were that the tool won't maximize on my laptop.

I've found some more threads by thinking of the keyword "attack" to search the forums and the items I found refer to cs scripts that arent used anymore. I've been working on this and I've gotten the dragon to shoot and my stress level has come down quite a bit.

I don't believe I've been "demanding" things. I'll agree that this thread has a very mean and angry tone to it. My other posts have been very cordial and polite. What's funny is this is the only thread that people have had an active interest in. I see so many threads posted from people asking the exact same questions that I have and they have been unanswered for months or even years. I'd think that the best bet for garagegames would be to answer these questions and keep people interested in their tools. Gather a list of the top unanswered threads and write a quick youtube video. These would help new people to TGB get thru the "dip". All my complaints have been about the bugs... not the work.

#12 I believe there is a "shoots at" behavior in the BehaviorPlayground project. If I am mistaken, it also use to be in the TDN under the behavior library section.

I point you to this merely as a place to look at an example of some working code. Most likely you will want/need to modify it for your purposes (as they are intended).

#13 Thanks James.

#14

Quote:Game development is hard

Thats not necessarily true, there are many products that can make games easier without scripting.. but this isnt really the place to talk about them. I think the game creating community have to be careful not to be too elitist (not saying you are... :). Yes making games does require effort, but the tool should make the process as easy and as intuitive as possible.

sqldbatx, you should always be careful using strong language on a forum, its just not polite. But I do understand your frustration. As I am a writer, the one thing that isnt helpful to new starters is documentation that is wrong or based on a previous version (so you cannot find the options). The tutorials do have a number of issues with them, which doesnt help people get upto speed quickly.

My advice is to slowly go through the tutorials, and when you have got to the stage of something in tbe tutorials that you intend to do in your own game, open up your own project and try it out. That way you have some reference to what you want to do. Unfortunately any documentation will not cover everything you want to do, so you will have to try things out for yourself at some point.

I always say there are three stages to making a game, setting the scene, configuring properties and creating game logic, you hopefully should be able to complete stages 1 and 2..and should do this before even trying to do the programming logic, then it should make it easy for you to move to the next stage.

Good luck and keep at it, you hopefully will get there... but remember do it in bitesize chunks, dont try to make the whole game in one go :)

#15 @Jason Darby
The scripting/no scripting line of thought is probably best served in a different topic; and is very interesting itself. RPG Maker 2000 is probably one of the best uses of knowing a good chunk of what people want to do to make an 8/16bit styled RPG and executing it with simple logic switches. Most general purpose visual scripting languages often fail horribly because they are so generic that they cease to be useful or are weighted towards such specific things that they are useful only to that thing and relatively useless elsewhere. Inform is probably the most elegant use of "no scripting" that I've seen since there is extremely minimal friction between telling your story and working within an Interactive Fiction framework. It's not a visual scripting language, but a lexical one that works nicely.

There will always be elitist members of a community, but since we have a large amount of hobbyist that are doing it for fun, there seem to be fewer here. Every now and again you'll get a post like "why use a scripting language? Real game programmers code in pure C++ and you suck if you don't" or the like; but it is usually a pretty rare occurrence. I try to quash such topics since I've played great games made in GameMaker, RPG Maker, and the ilk that these people are downplaying from the rooftops.

We do often get people who come in and expect the engine/tool to do their work for them. You see this on 3D graphics package sites all the time as well. "Here is an awesome piece of digital artwork; can I make something of that quality in Max?" The answer, 99% of the time is that the software is not the limiting factor; it is the artist using it or their experience level with the software. The renderer may be fully capable of multi-passing the pretty on a renderfarm, but that doesn't mean the person asking the question will be able to bring the pretty; especially if they do not know the first thing about the program and are not interested in learning it.

Even if you're using RPG Maker or GameMaker, making a game is hard. The tools can make it easier (though the interface for GameMaker is a mess). You can make a ton of prototypes, and they are often available to play from the YoYo! Games site. But the standout games took a lot of time, effort, and elbow grease to finish. For the hundreds of games available on the site, I'm sure there are thousands (if not many, many more) who had their dream and did not have the wherewithall to chunk it up, learn the tool, cut what needed to be cut, retool what was needed to make it fun, and show it to someone to see if they thought it was fun, too before getting it to release quality. Game development can take talent--I know a ton of talented people in the gamedev world. But it really, really takes a ton of hard work; which is where my "game development is hard" quote comes from. Not from some imagined complexity that is necessary though having to learn assembly to get developer props. Of course, on handheld systems that can net you a job.

@sqlbdatx
Sorry to derail the topic with the response.

I assume by your response then that you are considering a refund of the platformer kit since you did not find fault with TGB during your trial and ended up purchasing it. Philip seems to be answering your questions on the PSK specifics at the private forum.

#16

Quote:
You know, it's the small things that really anger me. The fact that I buy something and its full of bugs.

Get used to it. You should also be prepared to fix most of these bugs by yourself. You know, you got the source! :D

#17 RemovedPost::Wrong Thread