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AppGameKit Classic Chat / Explain that you use AGK in a Dev convention

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AliceSim1
5
Years of Service
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Joined: 15th Oct 2018
Location: Barcelona
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 12:55
I'm a strange person?
To all the people that talk about AppGameKit, they do not know anything about this video game engine.
A week ago, I presented my project and mentioned AppGameKit, and no one knew what it is!

Everybody tells me, to use Unity / Unreal engine....
But I do not want to! It works differently, using its complicated GUI and I consider development to be slow!

I am a strange person, for not wanting to use the famous engines of video game development.

I've always liked DarkBasic / Pro, and before the Div2GamesStudio (and divs-likes: BennuGD, Gemix),
Just give me an IDE as Notepad ++ to program, compile and execute.
I have always worked like this.

AGK I like it a lot, I'm happy, it was a good decision to buy the software!
Cliff Mellangard 3DEGS
Developer
18
Years of Service
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Joined: 20th Feb 2006
Location: Sweden
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 18:29
You dont nead to explain more then why you love it
GaborD
6
Years of Service
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Joined: 3rd Dec 2017
Location:
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 18:36
It's not strange at all, just a matter of preference.
In the age old mythical battle of "Game Dev vs. Download Button Pushing", you chose to be on the rebel side, opposing the dark forces of the empire.
GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
7
Years of Service
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Joined: 30th Nov 2016
Location: USA
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 18:44 Edited at: 15th Dec 2018 18:47
It's basically like this... working in things like Unity allow a person to quickly get "a result". Meaning they can load in assets and throw them into the scene. Hit run and see something.

A lot of people download some quality assets from the asset store or are artists themselves and make some high fidelity / high artist quality art assets... load these in and quickly throw them out into the scene. They "build" a nice looking scene. They hit play and they see the scene and are amazed by that.

It's kind of a deceptive thing imo where these kind of visually-oriented game engines allow a person to quickly & visually import art & sound assets and allow a person to quickly design a scene and hit play and wow they have a running program displaying a cool looking scene. They are more focused on the visual aspects of it. SEEING the scene. Even though in reality there is absolutely nothing to the scene beyond what can be seen still to them this is making game development so easy so fast they cannot understand why everyone isn't "making games" this way even though a lot of them are not actually completing games and instead are in reality simply importing art assets and designing cool looking scenes.

At least that is how I view it having participated on the Unity forum for about 5 years now and started using Unity about 5 years ago as well. I switched to AppGameKit because although it doesn't have the visual scene designer it makes everything else... the actual development work programming to be done much faster.
AliceSim1
5
Years of Service
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Joined: 15th Oct 2018
Location: Barcelona
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 20:10
Thank you for your encouragement, opinions and experiences.

It is true that modern engines have a visual editor of "scenes", which you can modify in real time, like a 3D modeling editor.

I know Unity, from its beta version for 2010, I was shocked, because of the complicated interface and not knowing where to start, in only english GUI.
It is a very powerful engine and slow in response time and load, requires a medium-high hardware.

GameMaker is very similar, also with scene editor and a similar GUI.

About 2006 I had a funny experience with the RPG Maker, I overdone it to the maximum and I realized that it is for children jajaja, you do not learn a programming language and besides being very limited jajaja.

I want to help make known that AppGameKit exists and it is good for those who love to program exclusively.
Here in Spain, (I am Spanish) I want to spread that there are other options!
Not always Unity / Unreal, Godot, Gamemaker ... That's fashion!
I am very interested in DarkBasic, also with AppGameKit I try to use multiplatform to the maximum that I can! Windows, Linux, Android ...
I have a RaspberryPi3, it's a love!
PartTimeCoder
AGK Tool Maker
9
Years of Service
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Joined: 9th Mar 2015
Location: London UK
Posted: 15th Dec 2018 20:24
Quote: "To all the people that talk about AppGameKit, they do not know anything about this video game engine."


Thats just it, IMO AppGameKit is not a game engine as such its a language that provides the functionally to make a game engine, that is just to much work for some folk.

For me, turning whitespace into something functional is what programming is all about, keep your fancy GUI's and visual editors just give me a code editor and am happy

Rick Nasher
6
Years of Service
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Joined: 25th Jul 2017
Location: Amsterdam
Posted: 16th Dec 2018 12:43
H*te the U-thing. And I actually gave it a shot. It's just too clunky with all that gui stuff even though at first may look easy, if you want to do something more in depth, that's easy to do in for instance agk, then you're going to hit your head more than once.

I really loose oversight with all that back and forth going between different modules. Guessing that OOP is "oops not for me". Sounds ok in theory but in the way implemented it's an absolute horror. Reminds me of spaghetti code..
Xaby
FPSC Reloaded TGC Backer
16
Years of Service
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Joined: 17th Apr 2007
Location: Berlin
Posted: 16th Dec 2018 18:44
a lot of the Unity games and also Unreal games are very slow in execution, because they are often used by non programmers. So the games are not optimised and don't run well.
Also they are to heavy for most simple 2D things, thats why people use Game Maker Studio for 2D.

Also for Unreal or Unity you would need Visual Studio and knowledge of C++ / C# for more advanced things.

In my opinion Unreal, Unity and AppGameKit at the same level for prototyping, but they also at the same level for more advanced projects. In AppGameKit you have to build the tools yourself, in Unity you have to "buy" the tools and plugins. And in Unreal, you have to understand them as well.

for low-end spec hardware all engines need to be optimised and that is special in every unique game for itself. Loading-times, draw-calls and so on ...

AGK can do games for the Raspberry Pi, can do that Unity or Unreal
Alex_Peres
AGK Master
14
Years of Service
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Joined: 13th May 2009
Location: The Milky Way Galaxy
Posted: 17th Dec 2018 22:06
If you make something simple (like every one of us guys) AppGameKit is enough for you.
GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
7
Years of Service
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Joined: 30th Nov 2016
Location: USA
Posted: 17th Dec 2018 22:41 Edited at: 17th Dec 2018 22:41
Things like Unity and Gamemaker Studio are very good but a person needs to connect with them. To me it is just that simple. There are people who very easily connect with those tools and their workflows. If you don't connect with them it is just a waste of time trying to force yourself too imo.

Nothing is "better" than anything else things are only better for different people or for different proiect types. I was never able to connect with Unity or Gamemaker Studio. I connected immediately and easily with AppGameKit. I also was shocked to find I connected well with Construct 2 and 3 when I tested them a month or two back. And I am looking forward to adding C2/C3 to my arsenal of dev tools.

Really though I agree with Alex in that I think if you are part of a team particularly a team of 5, 6, 7 or more people focused on making more ambitious scope of projects then things like Unity and Unreal make a lot more sense. Or if you are a solo dev and truly have never done any game dev before and know nothing about it then having the tutorials and the GUI allows you to throw stuff together and complete games. They won't be well developed but 99% of the time end users will never know that anyway which means they have no reason to care.

I don't why people get so defensive about tools and game engines. Maybe it is like a favorite sock or something. I don't know. But to me all of these things exist to help me get things done and whichever I connect with and can get things done most efficiently is what I will use. Like for my next two completely new games I am thinking I will do the 3D game in AppGameKit and the new 2D game in Construct 2 or 3 just to try it out fully.
AliceSim1
5
Years of Service
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Joined: 15th Oct 2018
Location: Barcelona
Posted: 17th Dec 2018 23:17
In my experience, I want to move forward and not start from 0 with an engine like Unity and be too novice for these modern, heavy engines and let's expire.

I have always worked with a simple programming IDE, which will color the source code, autocomplete, a documented API help, compile and execute.

AGK has saved me many thanks to its Debugger and to be able to trace the code in real time, seeing and analyzing all the variables, chains and arrays.

I'm a programmer for many years, about 15 years old and I made all kinds of small games, some have up to 1-2 hours of play, others are fun and re-playable!
but I have always programmed pure code.
Div2 GamesStudio, FenixGD / BennuGD, GemixStudio, DarkBasic / Pro ...
and now AppGameKit to buy the software because it is current, multiplatform and offers many features that DBpro lack and I greatly facilitate the development.
I just like it, it's the way to develop that I like!

Thanks to you, for your opinions, experiences, so we can discuss and share!
GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
7
Years of Service
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Joined: 30th Nov 2016
Location: USA
Posted: 18th Dec 2018 01:38 Edited at: 18th Dec 2018 18:31
AliceSim1 that's the same as me. Been programming making games since I had a TI-99/4a long ago. Started out in BASIC. Got a C64 a couple of years later and quickly switched to Assembly language. And I think you will find a lot of people here share the same background as we do.

I also believe this a big part of why at least for me personally I generally do not connect well with Visual Game Engines. It makes sense. Like you I come from using a simple text editor to do my programming even using Notepad for many years for C/C++ programming. So just having the ability to jump directly to functions, find all references, code completion etc of things like the AppGameKit and Visual Studio code editors is HUGE in itself. I completely understand what you are saying.

Like I said I was shocked to find that I actually connected with Construct 2 and 3. It was the first time ever for a visual programming environment like that. But I think that is just because I found it to be highly logical and it has a lot of stuff that speeds up development such as immediately and easily creating levels / worlds out of tile maps and so forth. I can and have programmed this stuff in AppGameKit but it is still a bit of a pain in the butt and I always look for ways I can streamline development.

Of course... saying that... I have only done some very tiny amount of experimenting with C2 and C3 so I may very well find that once I actually make a complete game with either it is a pain in the behind and I just throw them out and only use AGK. Lol

Honestly, I think it would be very cool if AppGameKit included built-in support for things like the Tiled Map Editor. So we could just design levels / areas in Tiled and one line load it in and have it all ready to use. Multiple layers support, change any cell on any layer any time we want, automatically handle the view size and so forth keeping it updated on screen. Adding easy methods for handling collisions would be icing on top. That would be a HUGE boost to productivity. Like I said I spent some time last year writing all of this stuff but it would be nice to not have it in a library I made for something like this. And just have it all built-in running at the max possible speed, etc. I see it as a fundamental thing. A person makes a 2D game a tile map is super common to be used.
AliceSim1
5
Years of Service
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Joined: 15th Oct 2018
Location: Barcelona
Posted: 19th Dec 2018 20:25 Edited at: 19th Dec 2018 20:26
Thank you for your opinions and point of view on this topic.

We have a lot in common with most people, here in the AppGameKit community, DBpro.

I started with only 16 years old, without knowing anything about programming and video game design, I speak for the year 2000
Thanks to Div2 GamesStudio, Cd-Rom plus a complete theoretical book, the help is also integrated in HTML:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIV_Games_Studio
La documentacion HTML (EspaƱol)


Without Internet, I learned alone, without help.
and I have enjoyed for many years creating all kinds of projects, I have more than 20.

Here are my last projects created with Gemix Studio (Modern version of Div2)
https://www.youtube.com/user/simulatorone/

Attached a screenshot, with notepad ++ with the game Pengiun-PUSH made with GemixStudio
And I made it publish the game:
https://alicesim1.itch.io/penguinpush

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puzzler2018
User Banned
Posted: 19th Dec 2018 20:28 Edited at: 19th Dec 2018 20:29
Wow that IDE brings back memories with the look and feel of Turbo Pascal and Borland C

Nice one! thanks
GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
7
Years of Service
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Joined: 30th Nov 2016
Location: USA
Posted: 19th Dec 2018 20:40 Edited at: 19th Dec 2018 20:42
Very cool! I use Notepad++ too. At home and also installed it as my default text editor at work. It's extremely good.

Wow another game dev tool I had not heard of. Have checked out a lot of them and am familiar with DIV (in fact someone here messaged me to give it a try not long after I joined these forums). But had not heard of Gemix Studio. I will have to check it out.

Those are very nice looking game projects.

My next tool I will be testing is Construct 2 or 3. Tonight I plan on starting work on a simple Christmas game in it and see how I like it. I also want to test Defold which looks really good but I just haven't had time yet.

So many awesome game dev tools and more and more are made every year.

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