Ah, OK. What you want is not possible. A game is art (audiovisual assets or story) plus code. In a pinch, you can get by with very little art, if for example you're making a text-based dice game. But you can't get by without code. Game development IS programming. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.
(See all those "Script SCOL" files in your screen shot? Those are program code.)
On the other hand, programming is the most fun and rewarding hobby I can think of. Maybe you should give it a try? I bet it's easier than you think!
Jumping in a bit late, but it sounds like you might be interested in Mini Micro. It doesn't use BASIC (which is way too crude by modern standards), but a language called MiniScript, which is just as easy but a lot more modern and powerful.
You create a Mini Micro game (like these) by assembling your assets, exactly as you show above: PNGs and JPEGs for images, WAVs and OGGs for sound and music, and text files for the scripts and data. You can edit those scripts using the built-in source code editor, or you can use Notepad or any other text editor.
We have an active community on Discord, and (somewhat less active) web forums. And I'm always happy to help a newbie learn to code.
After more thinking & playing around, I think I'm going to demo Wang 2-corner (called Marching Squares in the blog post above). It seems like a generally useful format, as good for grass/rock terrain textures as it is for Pac-Man mazes.
Now I just need to find (or make) a nice collection of tilesets in this format!
Can you expand on how to use this? I gather you calculate an index number by assigning bits to the 8 surrounding tiles. But that would result in 256 different tiles; this has only 64 (and many of those are duplicates). So I'm confused.
Thanks, will do. MiniScript is a lot easier to embed (and lighter-weight) than Python, and a lot nicer to use (in my opinion of course) than Lua. So I'll send him a note! Thanks for the assist.
I haven't tried flare, but it looks to me like its modding is currently limited to data: adding item/unit types, and changing configuration parameters. That's always a good start for a modding API, but either your modders are limited in how much they can change actual behavior/logic, or you end up with some abomination like Wesnoth Markup Language [1].
What would really help in cases like this would be to embed a real scripting language. MiniScript [2] was designed for just such embedding. There is a C++ implementation of MiniScript [3] that would be very easy to integrate with flare, and then modders could use a simple, elegant, Unicode-savvy, fully-featured programming language to script the game.
Who should I contact to explore this possibility further?
Ah, OK. What you want is not possible. A game is art (audiovisual assets or story) plus code. In a pinch, you can get by with very little art, if for example you're making a text-based dice game. But you can't get by without code. Game development IS programming. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.
(See all those "Script SCOL" files in your screen shot? Those are program code.)
On the other hand, programming is the most fun and rewarding hobby I can think of. Maybe you should give it a try? I bet it's easier than you think!
Here are the two-corner Wang tiles I came up with, suitable for prototyping, use as a template, or as-is for Pac-Man style mazes: https://opengameart.org/content/clean-2-corner-wang-tileset
Jumping in a bit late, but it sounds like you might be interested in Mini Micro. It doesn't use BASIC (which is way too crude by modern standards), but a language called MiniScript, which is just as easy but a lot more modern and powerful.
You create a Mini Micro game (like these) by assembling your assets, exactly as you show above: PNGs and JPEGs for images, WAVs and OGGs for sound and music, and text files for the scripts and data. You can edit those scripts using the built-in source code editor, or you can use Notepad or any other text editor.
We have an active community on Discord, and (somewhat less active) web forums. And I'm always happy to help a newbie learn to code.
After more thinking & playing around, I think I'm going to demo Wang 2-corner (called Marching Squares in the blog post above). It seems like a generally useful format, as good for grass/rock terrain textures as it is for Pac-Man mazes.
Now I just need to find (or make) a nice collection of tilesets in this format!
Nice work! And thanks for including the helpful link to Guy Walker's explanation.
Can you expand on how to use this? I gather you calculate an index number by assigning bits to the 8 surrounding tiles. But that would result in 256 different tiles; this has only 64 (and many of those are duplicates). So I'm confused.
I used Adobe Graphic (another vector drawing app).
And thanks for the words of encouragement. I think you're right.
Oops, just sent you a PM before seeing this. Well, if you ever change your mind, you know where to find me! :)
Thanks, will do. MiniScript is a lot easier to embed (and lighter-weight) than Python, and a lot nicer to use (in my opinion of course) than Lua. So I'll send him a note! Thanks for the assist.
I haven't tried flare, but it looks to me like its modding is currently limited to data: adding item/unit types, and changing configuration parameters. That's always a good start for a modding API, but either your modders are limited in how much they can change actual behavior/logic, or you end up with some abomination like Wesnoth Markup Language [1].
What would really help in cases like this would be to embed a real scripting language. MiniScript [2] was designed for just such embedding. There is a C++ implementation of MiniScript [3] that would be very easy to integrate with flare, and then modders could use a simple, elegant, Unicode-savvy, fully-featured programming language to script the game.
Who should I contact to explore this possibility further?
[1] https://wiki.wesnoth.org/AdvancedConditionalWML
[2] https://miniscript.org
[3] https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript/tree/master/MiniScript-cpp
Pages