Bay 12 Games Forum

Back in the early 2000s when I first started programming I used Game Maker. Man I regret that decision, a lot of bad habits and misunderstandings that had to be corrected because of it.

If all you want to do is make games, then by all means this is actually a pretty nifty tool.

If you are a beginner that plan to learn some programming on the side I would tell you to stay the hell away from this.

GML, the programming language of game maker, is the peak of insane language design. It is purely imperative, with a fucked up typing/scoping system which leads to some pretty bad programming habits if you learn it as a first language.

Go with Unity and pick one of the holy three Python/JS/CS.

Eh, still worth it to grab it anyway to tinker with down the road simply because it's free and doesn't eat up all that much hdd space. I personally haven't messed with it since about 07 or 08, except now to check it out again, but I'm almost 100% sure it's changed a good bit since you tried it in the early 2000's. I can only think of one or two things a person might not understand after using gamemaker studio, but it's positive sides include the relative ease of making a finished product and its ability to export games to multiple formats like android, pc, whathaveyou (this is definitely a more recent feature, I'll admit).

I've never used Unity, I always assumed it just used C+ or its own proprietary language. You can use python with it, then? I may just have to give it a whirl, if that's the case... though at the moment, I'm working with libtcod, so I'll probably just stick to pure python for now.

http://nanowrimo.org/participants/hiddentruth/novels/blood-in-the-stars/stats

Validated winner status, baby! I'm happy beyond belief. There just aren't any words for it.

Now the real challenges begin: finishing the novel, writing more stories, and being published. Making a life out of it. Maybe I'll fail, maybe I won't make it, maybe it's hopeless, but if November has proven anything to me, it's that I can write a novel and keep at it day after day. That's all I need to try.

As someone who has been a lazy procrastinator all his life, doing nothing of real worth, winning NaNo has been one of the better moments in my life. Today is a damn good day.

I... I think I'm in love. If this game ends up being CK2ish + Space, you'll have made my day. Nay, my year. Nay! My life. Seriously.

Man today was a doosie. My brain did not what to cooperate. I kept trying to make excuses. I started and stopped more than one scene today. I had to leave them to write in later, so I could find where my brain would finally stop pestering me and let me write. I wouldn't let myself give up, though.

Ended up getting 2073 words in within 2 hours though, so today was... strange for me. A slow start lead to a better than usual writing session. I dread going through that again. It took a lot of effort to motivate myself. I'd heard the quote "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," before now, but today I really felt it.

It's not necessarily that it's difficult to write if you're a writer, but it is sometimes difficult to stay determined to write without giving up. For non-writers, its easy to simply give up. They don't have to write. They aren't compelled to do it in the way writers are. I feel like this year I finally crossed that threshold from non-writer to writer, and it feels good.

by substantial, I mean that "the author of the thread is leaving substantial parts out", not you; I figured that was understood.

...I'm just gonna show myself out now.

Well for one, I suggest no posting anything until you have something substantial, content-wise. I admire the fact that you are trying to write despite your dyslexia - and apparent young age? - but posting it sentence by sentence here isn't a positive way of gaining feedback, nor is it a successful way to approach the literary craft.

Write a rough draft. I mean a full, complete rough draft. Write a few thousand words if it's going to be a short story, several tens of thousands if it's novella-length, or a hundred thousand on up if you intend for it to be a novel. Then set it aside for a while. Then come back to it and reread it. Fix things up a bit, whether it be flow, content, or grammar; first drafts are never, ever perfect. The second draft is the absolute minimum needed before it is advisable to seek feedback on anything.

Once you've done that, then that's when it might be appropriate to consider sharing it with the world. But when you do, make sure you're clear up front about what you want from those you solicit; whether you want critique, or are merely sharing it for others. Be forewarned, even if you're not positing it for critique, the internet isn't the most pleasant place. Nor is the world of literature, for that matter. It'll be critiqued and criticized anyway. Also, finding a proper way to distribute the piece is an issue all by itself; the formatting, the method of distribution, etc. are all things you should consider more carefully.

Look at this as subtle encouragement! I'm certainly not discouraging a dyslexic writer newbling from finding their footing in the world of writing, but it seems like there are a certain number of minutiae regarding both writing and activity on forums that you seem unaware of. So, I'll leave you with this advice and say: good luck!

Wish I knew how to help, but I know zero about Scrivener. All you people and your fancy word processors, I swear.

I still use good ol' 2007 Microsoft Works - yup, not even Office, I use Works - for my story in a single document, formatted to make export to ebook formatting easy to do, and if there's any notes I need to keep track of, I use Word Pad docs. I find other word processors to be too cluttered or, worse, too organized. I just can't stand the way things like yWrite and Scrivener are set up for some reason. Atlantis Word Processor is alright, but it's basically Works+ and I still ultimately prefer Works.

I've considered maybe putting some information into LitLift, not that it's really a Word Processor, when I reread my story to begin the second draft a couple weeks/months after my first draft is finished, so I know what needs to be fixed/what happens when I change something. But that's the most fancy I plan on getting with technology for writing this novel.

Unless you count scraping together some sc-ifi stock photos to make cover art for an e-book version, anyway.