Will you provide feedback on my labor of love? | Hacker News Reader

Will you provide feedback on my labor of love?

4 pointsmindsetlabs6 comments

I wonder how many people out there would like to build a game but just don't know how to get started creating one? Or maybe you are a game designer or game artist but just don't have the programming skills? I was apart of the former case and thats why I created GameBuilder Studio. I would like to get feedback on what you guys think of what I've built. http://vimeo.com/31183644

View on HN

This seems more like a video of a very cumbersome interface for coding than a video of building a game without any coding. To build a simple vertically scrolling shmup with no complex behavior, the user has to understand a great many concepts and metaphors that would normally be completely unnecessary for such a game. He must type values into a text box to move a flame by trial and error when he could do it by dragging it into place much faster.

The user also gets to use member variables of the in-game entities to compute each other, which is powerful, but seems to be programming.

thanks @anonymoushn I agree, the interface could be simplified. The terms are more technical terms so that the concepts aren't watered down and to allow the user to get familiar with the lingo so that if they decided to add to their skill set or work with other programs they would have learned it here first. The fact that you have to type in values is a pain and noted, I want to add a browser for you to just select options that go in those fields instead of you having to enter them.

What do you think about the amount of environment setup that is not needed the ant build scripts and knowledge of frameworks that is not needed to get something up and running and very soon be able to deploy to mobile with a click of a button. Is that not a big time saver?

It is a big time saver to not have to worry about the build, but I think that a few frameworks that just abstract a collection of libraries like love and pygame accomplish the same thing pretty well. This is my build script for a love game:

  #!/bin/sh
  rm panel-attack.love
  zip panel-attack.love *.lua *.txt README THANKS COPYING server.py build.sh assets/*.png assets/*/*.png

It seems like it wouldn't be much of a pain even if I had to do it manually. That said, I'm not the audience for your project. I have no idea what difficulties a non-programmer would have getting a basic Python or Lua environment set up with one of these frameworks.

I hadn't read about the extensibility aspect when I left my previous comment. After reading about that, it seems very useful to introduce users to the concepts their game will be based on so that they can begin programming at a comfortable pace. GameBuilder Studio can become really great as the interface improves. I hope it starts paying your rent so you can keep working on it.

Yea Your probably not my target audience if your comfortable with your setup but think about those that don't know lua or how to run a shell script from the command line. Not even mentioning what they need to know to get their game compiled and running on both iOS, and Android. For example, my younger brother came to me asking how he could make a game and the only way for him to technically build a game would be to learn some programming language like lua, as3 or something else, but I thought it would be great if he could just download a tool, create something and put it on the app store or share with his friends. As he continues to develop his technical skills he can grow with the tool and eventually write scripts to add more complex behavior if he wanted to. So the ease of use to get started and flexibility to extend the tool was key for me. Being able to get visual feedback and put your idea together really quickly instead of having to learn a bunch of stuff before you can even get started is compelling to me.

If I had the time I'd probably try it out, it looks pretty slick.

Where it says play anywhere on your front page, I didn't know what that meant. Web on your server? Web on my server? Cross platform? I was reluctant to sign in and find out.

@sixtofour It should probably be "deploy" everywhere

Reply on news.ycombinator.com