This morning I was sort of reminiscing about the good old days when I was a kid and would make extremely simple games with a program called
Klik & Play. I was around 7 years old when I would play with this software and I used it up until about the age of 13 when I ended up moving on to Flash. My memories of K&P and time spent with that program are extremely fond though. I made a lot of really fun things and got a lot of good self expression out. I remember this one game I made where you went around killing all the
Power Rangers and everyone's favorite purple dinosaur Barney. You were some kind of makeshift army man and the characters would bounce around the screen with various obstacles and holes you could fall into. When you shot them their bodies would explode and their heads would fall into a pool of blood.
I am terribly sorry to anyone who loved Power Rangers or Barney back in the day. No harm done, right?
I was scanning the internet today for this game and came upon the developers
website thanks to good old
Wikipedia. I read about some newer software that Clickteam had been working on. One thing that caught my eye was
The Games Factory 2. The program appears to be as user friendly as K&P and most likely offers the same level of creativity. One thing about K&P that I liked was modifying objects in the game and just re-drawing everything without having to worry about "programming" or "scripting." It's unclear if you can do this with The Games Factory 2 also but I am assuming it's possible.
I also came across a
link where you can download the original Klik & Play for free... presumably. I am at work right now and don't feel like actually downloading this and trying it out but I'll know right when I get home tonight.
I like to get creative with programs like these quite frequently. I was wondering if any of you have ever used anything like this? Also if you're into 3D modeling the program I like to use is
Milkshape but I doubt I could incorporate those models into something as simple as The Games Factory 2. I also do Flash animation and mess around with scripting and whatnot in that. I mostly do music videos but I haven't submitted anything for a long time to Newgrounds where I put my flash up. You can view my work
here just look for the name Tim Urlacher. I love me some Radiohead.
So anybody here every try any of these game development programs? If so, what did you think. They seem like a simple and fast way to express oneself as far as I can tell.
I made TONS of games with Klik n Play, and I like to think I invented Grand Theft Auto before they even made the top down ones. It was called Humphrey Higgens and you were a gardener/camper/landscaper who could choose to kill people if he wanted. Seems you and I were both sick children :P
My brother makes a game every now and then with Games Factory 2, though I heard Multimedia Fusion 2 isn't bad, it gives you more licensing rights and event options. I got discouraged after awhile when I lost all my games (twice) when I got new computers. So much death... so much time spent on them...
Hmmmm... maybe I'll get back into it... nice post!
Oh you made the Radiohead animation? I love it. Great work.
Dude back in the day my computer running Windows 3.1 crashed and I lost all of my games too! I've also lost all of my animations before and even lost a Radiohead video I spent 40 hours making. It was my 5th Radiohead vid and will never see the internet... So yeah.. things like that are discouraging but I am trying to get back into things just for fun.
Thanks for the props on the animation! =)
I had never heard of this program but it sounds pretty damn cool, man. 3D modeling is a lot of fun as well... have you ever worked with POV Ray?
I have not. Shoot me a link so I can see what it's all about.
just found your blog over the net ,i have a few comments about K&P TGF ,TGF2 and also MMF2,first i own all of them to answer your question holytheline yes TGF2 is simple to use as K&P was if you are doing games like K&P ones but if you want to integrate scrolling and fine collision detection doing something more advance than a simple shooter game or mario style games ,it is a little more difficult to achive because TGF2 have more power than K&P and also more extensions and more movenents engine exemp...vector movement,special spaceship movements,flipper movement..etc. another thing that TGF2 can do is,compile your game as java appelet and java web start as well as standart executable.the down point about TGF2 is you have a splash screen at the end of your application or game ,very similar than the one with Klik and Play but smaller ,that is the big difference between,TGF2 and MMF2 is the splash screen ,You don t have any with MMF2 and much more extentions and activex too and you will be able to save your game as Java,Executable and also mobile phone device in near future in fact the last update have this feature but in beta test.about 3D well i am not very familiar with 3D but i know you can fake it very easy with TGF2 and MMF2 but the main Engine of these 2 programs is still 2D.
Hope That help
Gino