If you haven't been keeping up with this blog, you may not know that we decided to make our next game in Flash CS4 (using actionscript 3.0). The decision to do so mostly had to do with it's cross platform capabilities (which means we could make a game that game be played on any computer, pc or mac). In addition, we'd like to try our hand at micro transaction type of stuff and Flash is pretty much the platform to do that with.
As the code for The Good Apprentice isn't finished completely since we decided to add in a neat little Easter egg, we recently had to go back to coding. Good golly was using Game Maker so easy to use after dealing with the more scripting nature of Flash. It was kind of a shock going back to using the super simple format of Game Maker! Off the top of my head, there are at least 4 things that made using Game Maker way easier than in Flash:
1. Game Maker has a built in level editor
This is the biggest thing that we're missing in Flash. We have to actually build one in Flash, and it's a bit difficult to make and it takes quite a long time to make it.
2. Resource management is easier in Game Maker
The way that Game Maker is organizes it's resources makes things really easy to use. Flash seems to organize the resources you load into the program alphabetically. Essentially, that means that resources have to be named according to what they do (ie sprites are named SprMainCharacter). We do this anyways, but it's easier to read in Game Maker.
3. Referencing is easier in Game Maker
This is something only you coders would understand, but it's such a bitch keeping track of every instances' reference in Flash. Plus, we have to have, like 8 arrays to hold all of the instance references...
4. The Game Maker community is "friendlier"
One of the reasons why we were even able to finish a video game in the first place was because of the friendly and helpful service in the Game Maker forums. There were people just like us who knew next to nothing about programming.
While we're on a variety of Flash forums, it seems like most people don't have time to answer our simple questions. It's really frustrating working like that as sometimes we can't proceed without knowing what to do.
Overall, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to work with a wonderful editor like Game Maker for so long. We learned a bunch about game design, and we learned a bunch of programming basics that have translated well into Flash programming. If we had to give advice to anyone new just like us, we would definitely recommend finding a game engine that you feel comfortable with and don't worry about learning programming.
After all, you need to make games not engines!
