Speculations About the Mini-LD

Posted by Henry McLaughlin (twitter: @henrythescot)

May 4th, 2012 7:51 pm

So… there’s a Mini-LD this month, right? I thought so.

Well… I’m going to be doing freelance work (hopefully), but I can will carve out some time for the Mini-LD.

So here are some tools that I’m thinking about:

• XNA with C#
• XNA with Visual Basic (as of 4.0 “refresh”, XNA supports Visual Basic!)
• Construct 2
• Unity Free
• Python+Pygame+py2exe
• Game Maker (unlikely, though)
• FlashPunk + AIR
• Flixel + AIR

That being said, I’m not sure yet. I’m leaning toward XNA+C# or Construct 2 at the moment…

Any thoughts on this are welcome!

With this many options, how can I go wrong?

- Henry

 

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 7:51 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Speculations About the Mini-LD”

1. digital_sorceress says:

   May 5, 2012 at 6:35 am

   I’m not sure if XNA has much of a future. So it may not be a good thing to start learning.

   Flash is also getting old now… with the rise of webgl and html5 it too may have less than 5 years left before it is obsolete.

   Game Maker has a bit of stigma, and you may struggle to stand out from the crowd with it.

   Free Unity is the most fashionable option at the moment, but you can only produce non-commercial things with it.

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   • Henry McLaughlin says:

     May 5, 2012 at 12:05 pm

     So what would you recommend?

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2. Attrition says:

   May 7, 2012 at 7:42 am

   If you want to learn something that you can apply to several operating systems (good for LD), I’d go with Unity — and note that contrary to what another poster said, you CAN make commercial products with Unity Free. This is from their official FAQ:

   Can we sell games and make money with the free version of Unity?
   Yes! You certainly can– and without royalties nor paying any revenue share! If your game is a commercial success, we hope you’ll upgrade to Unity Pro!

   So don’t worry about that. As an alternative, flash is probably the most easily accessed from all platforms, so something Flixel or FlashPunk is good knowledge. Finally, HTML5 is coming around, though it’s not polished yet.

   I used to use XNA, but I moved to Unity. I agree that XNAs future is dim.

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