sup, new to the boards.

this seems like a knowledgable place, and i was wondering if u guys could give me some advice. my friend and i are embarking on making a videogame for a school project. the problem is, its only two of us, and we have shortly less than a year to do it. now we're not going for some high calibur big-budget game or anything. but our goal is something respectable, in 3d, maybe online playable.

i've seen some game making tools mentioned in another thread (torque, MMF etc.). has anyone heard of anymore out there, or could you rank the one's mentioned so far? or could u point me to some more sites like garagegames that offer resources on how an indie developer would go about this arduous process (making an engine, time it takes, etc.)?

we are proficient in only c++ and are not going for fancy graphics (ffx cutscenes) if that's of any relevance.

any help would be greatly appreciated!
thanks.....

Hi there passenger and welcome to the forums! :D

I'd first suggest you and your friend to read some articles ( www.dexterity.com/articles ) before getting into actual making.

And there are some good tools available.
-Torque engine (from the makers of Tribes) which uses c++ kind of syntax (www.garagegames.com)
-Blitz3D is powerful 3D sdk and uses BASIC like syntax (altough not to be afraid of that - it compiles it same way as c++ so no fear of losing any performance). the url is: www.blitzbasic.com

Good luck with your school project!

The very best advice I can give you is not to do 3D graphics, and not to even think about online play. This is only a school project and the most important criteria it will be judged on is not how many dimensions the graphics have but whether it's finished or not and how well it's written.

Cas :)

I second that! Don't make the mistake to bite of more then you can chew.

If you go with 2D, you may also want to look at GameMaker (http://www.gamemaker.nl/) .

5.0 is completly free, but 5.1 (which is in beta right now, should be full by the end of the month) will be shareware (but it's only $15).

GameMaker uses a language called "GML" (Game Maker Language) but if you know C++ or PHP you should have no problem figuring it out.

I don't think this would be a good tool for someone looking to go into the game creation market, but for a low-budget, low-resource school project it might be useful :)

any advice on how to go about this for n00bs?
sup, new to the boards.
this seems like a knowledgable place, and i was wondering if u guys could give me some advice.
Yes. Sorry to be the language nazi of the day, but that "style" of writing makes my eyes hurt!

A year and two people... I think it's reasonable to do something 3D but not fancy, even if you go as low level as directly writing OpenGL code.

Apart from the tools others have mentioned, I'd say you should carefully think what are you going to do, especially if it will be 3D. For example, making a game with cars or spaceships is in a different level of complexity than doing a game with humanoid characters with skeletal animations.

In the end, I agree with what was said : don't bite more than you can chew.

hey, thanks for all the posts so far!

Princec - that's probably the thing that i was most affraid to hear. here's why i wanted to do 3d. i go to Devry, which is a business oriented place. and we'll be presenting to professors who know nothing about games, so they wouldnt be able to appreciate it either way. actually, we had to "pull some strings" to even have the project approved! i figured 3d would at least make them take us seriously. online i guess isnt a must, but just looks cool ;)

mattius - i know what you mean, i wont even have more than a few levels anyway, with only basic models. we dont plan to pull to many all-nighters for this, so we'll keep it as simple as possible.

ggambett - we are actually starting some opengl. maybe that with a game making tool could get us in the right direction?

once again, thanks for all the input. i'm gonna take a look at those articles Morphecy reccomended and consult with my teammate before putting anything in stone. actually, he'll probably post here too, once i get him to read this thread. still open to input though, so anyone else feel free to post or reply!