Anyone have any experience developing and selling games made with a game creation kit? I'm an experienced programmer, but am always looking for ways to cut development time. 2D tile and sprite based graphics is basically a solved problem. Unlike 3D there doesn't seem to be much left to advance in the technical sense. So as long as it has sufficient scripting or dll support to implement the game design I have in mind it seems to be a win-win situation. In particular I'm looking at Game Maker and Multimedia Fusion as both allow royalty free redist of games and produce exe's.

Jack

I've been really impressed with multimedia fusion. There's this really cool game called "Eternal Daughter". It's a side scrlling rpg of sorts. Very interesting.
I have heard that you dont want to use the tile collision engine that comes with MMF and that you want to write your own. However I've also been told that this is pretty easy to implement your own, on the order of an evening or two.

I really love Blitz3D......its totally based on DirectX and is very easy for me to use....its a SDK specially for games and replaces the 20 lines of code for 1 DirectX function with just a 1 line command, which really shortens developing time which is of course very important these days....:D :cool: ;)

I took a quick look at GIME (http://www.gime.org), which was posted onto GameDev.net recently. It's not really a game creation kit, more of a framework. It's based quite a bit on existing SDL third-party libraries, but they've also plugged in Lua (http://www.lua.org/) for scripting. Anybody try it yet? I hadn't heard of Lua before, it looks interesting.

I've played with Mark Overmars' Game Maker (http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/) a year ago and was impressed with it. I had some difficulty getting a useful result, although I think I just didn't give it enough time. My impression was it's probably better for shooters than puzzles. I should probably take a second look at it, especially with the new features he's added.

The thing that has always kept me from doing anything more that just simple test/example programs with alot of tool kits/ languages geared towards game development, has always been stabilty and compatabilty.

Sure it runs fine on my machine and the developers machine, but how well will it perform on the myriad of machines that are out there?

I want to feel confident in the tools I use, not worried about what kind of customer support problems am I setting myself up for.

I'm not saying this tool or that tool is buggy, etc. I just need to see others having success with it before I would think of using it seriously.

There are a few that fit the bill, but not many.

David