Author Topic: Express Game Maker (Read 7182 times)

#1 • Apr 8, 2010

Quote from: 'Express Game Maker'

We are pleased to announce Express Game Maker (EGM)!

Ever wanted to make games but you don't know how to program or draw? Wait no more! Express Game Maker is a 2D game making software that requires no programming or artistic knowledge to use. Make games for Windows, Xbox Live, and Silverlight.

What makes Express Game Maker different from the rest?

Intuitive user-interface… powerful C# engine… ease of use… loads of features… and multi-platform deployment.

EGM is designed from the ground up to be user friendly as well as powerful. Keeping in mind both beginner and advanced users, EGM has features to cater for all.

Beginner game developers will be able to take advantage of:
•   Project templates that come with pre-setup data to quickly get them started.
•   Resource packages that provide graphics, font and audio they can use in their games.
•   The release version of EGM will also come with a built-in tutorial system to guide you through creating your first game.
Advanced users will be able to make their own project templates and take full advantage of:
•   The custom databases.
•   The powerful event editor.
•   Multi-Variable System.
•   The particle system.
Programmers can enhance their games by adding their own code to the fully open source C# engine written on top of XNA and even share the code with others.

ExpressGameMaker.com/Features
More features will be revealed every three days (some sooner), so check back soon.

ExpressGameMaker.com – Our main website
facebook.com/ExpressGameMaker - EGM on Facebook
twitter.com/EGMaker - Follow us on Twitter

Place one or more of these in your signature and spread EGM! (Link back to this thread or our website)

The Release Candidate’s Release Date is planned to be sometime in February or March 2010.
More info will come to follow, so check the website frequently.
expressgamemaker.com/BetaPortal.aspx

Quote from: 'ExpressGameMaker'

Hello everyone,

This week on EGM we are going to talk about EGM’s progress, go a little more in-depth about events and show you some more EGM resources. On top of that we have some great news (!) and some not so good news.

First the good news…
EGM now supports the Farseer Physics Engine! This opens up hundreds of new possibilities for you game developers. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to do everything the physics engine can because we just don’t have time to integrate the whole system. However, we do have some great demos and games planned using it .

Will this make EGM hard to use? Nope, not at all. We will provide you with the necessary templates to get you started easy and if you want to be adventurous and set your own parameters, it’s easy as filling a few number boxes (literally), you’ll just need to test more often for the desired effect.

We also realize that not all objects should be mobilized by physics, such as NPC characters. That is why we added in an option to make events Static and assign them a move speed (per frame). However, static objects can’t collide with other static objects (such as tiles), only dynamic objects. So this means the player and enemies and any other dynamic objects require physics to interact.

The bad news…

Implementing physics wasn’t easy and although we pulled all nighters, it took a good chunk of our time. So, unfortunately, we won’t be able to able to deliver EGM this month. To make up for it, we’ll start releasing videos (!) starting next week.

If you are interested, check out www.farseergames.com. It contains some games made with Farseer physics.

This week, we’ll take a look at Events. They certainly changed a lot more since we initially talked about them. To get an overview of Events, check out here. We won’t tell you everything about events; it would take more than a single post. Instead we’ll highlight some of its features.

This is a map event. You program it with a “point-and-click” interface and it does the rest. Each event can have multiple pages and each page contains the same options.
Let’s start the dissection.

This is the event’s setup panel. You can choose its animation, particle effect, program its auto-dynamics, set its static or physics based settings, define it as an enemy, determine its activation and trigger conditions.

The above left screenshot contains the activation tab which stores the activations and trigger conditions. There are 5 activation conditions and 6 trigger conditions. As the screenshot on the right displays, four of the activation conditions can have multiple conditions within. So you can have 3 switch conditions, 4 variable conditions, and so on. You can also have an unlimited (but limited by hardware) amount of variables, switches, local variables, and local switches.

Out of the 6 trigger conditions, 3 of them contain extra options; Collision, Mouse, and Input. This allows for many ways to trigger your events. Perhaps your game allows dragging furniture around? Make the event mouse trigger and in the Programs, store the mouse coordinates in to two variables (x,y) and create a new event command that moves the event to the coordinates of the two variables (Set Event Location).

Program dynamics allows you to program your event’s movement from simple commands such as move forward to commands such as pathfinding (Move To and Move To Event).

These are just a few of the move commands. As you can see, the movement directions are angle based (360 degrees). In the first shot, "Move To Event", you determine the target event and the pathfinder does the rest. In the second shot ,"Move", you give the direction and distance (64) and the event will move. The third shot, "Move Random", allows you to select out of which directions the event should move randomly to and also how far.

The commands list is where you can program the event. It has 14 categories and each category contains its own relevant commands. Below are some of the categories and their commands:

It’s quite simple to use these commands. Just click on the desired command and a dialog will pop-up with extra options.

That’s it. All you have to do is just be creative .

This week we'll share some music our musicians worked on. Click on the names to listen to them.

Town 1
Dungeon 3
Battle 1

These are for the first RPG Pack. There are plenty more of course and more in the making as well.

Remember to tell others about us!
Express Game Maker Team

Quote from: 'ExpressGameMaker'

Hello everyone,

This week on EGM we will release the first video on EGM and tell you about our progress.
You can watch the video on our youtube page http://www.youtube.com/user/ExpressGameMaker.

Don't forget to rate the video!

This video is for those who are already familiar with EGM or any other game maker and game development. Our next video will be for those who are unfamiliar with it .

So far, the development on EGM is going smooth and we have already started the first phase of the private beta testing.

The battle system and the menu maker are also almost complete. We’ve tweaked the UI and added some new UI elements to make EGM easier to use some of which can be seen in the video.

We have only a few more features to complete and EGM will be ready for the second phase of testing.

Remember to tell others about us!
Express Game Maker Team

Ps. we apologize for the 3 week delay in updates and activity. The delays were mostly non-development related so we can’t disclose them to the public. Also, we do read your suggestions but we are to busy to reply back at this time. Thank you for being patient.