[m96]

Today, a person e-mailed me about the Build Engine. He wants to create a new game but I do not know how to advise him. I should also note that he is inexperienced with programming.

So guys, what should I say?

[blizzart]

m96, on 15 June 2016 - 03:36 AM, said:

Today, a person e-mailed me about the Build Engine. He wants to create a new game but I do not know how to advise him. I should also note that he is inexperienced with programming.

So guys, what should I say?

I think EDuke32 should be the best way to go for a standalone mod / game. See AMC TC or WG Realms 2 which are standalone. With its def-file feature and tilefromtexture he even wouldn´t have to mess around with ART-files anymore.

[Kyanos]

Just send him here to these forums, with a link to EDuke32, and Mapster32 downloads as well.

[TerminX]

Send him to http://wiki.eduke32.com and http://infosuite.duke4.net. EDuke32 is a perfectly good choice of engine to create games of this type with.

[Hendricks266]

m96, on 15 June 2016 - 03:36 AM, said:

I should also note that he is inexperienced with programming.

That's a non-starter as far as making a full game. He has to start small and develop talents. Have him check out the map editor and the scripting tutorials.

My advice: Don't come here as an "ideas man". No one wants that.

[m96]

If I may ask why is an "ideas man" so frowned upon?

[Daedolon]

You need to get shit done to get shit done.

[Hendricks266]

If you don't have any talents, than coming to the table with only ideas means you don't have any sense of how they fare in practice: feasibility, quality, etc.

[HulkNukem]

Hendricks266, on 19 June 2016 - 06:34 PM, said:

If you don't have any talents, than coming to the table with only ideas means you don't have any sense of how they fare in practice: feasibility, quality, etc.

When I browse Unity and Unreal forums and see threads "Need help developing brand new game. Large open world, lots of players, thousands of weapons, many different classes, lots and lots of unique skills and upgrades. I'm currently in high school but I want to make this game because other companies aren't doing them right."

[PokeThePower]

m96, on 19 June 2016 - 06:08 AM, said:

If I may ask why is an "ideas man" so frowned upon?

Because every programmer, artist, designer, marketer, and janitor is expected to be smart enough to have good ideas.

Otherwise they are dangerous and liable to cost you a lot of money and potentially other team members.

[deuxsonic]

You've probably heard the phrase "good ideas are a dime a dozen." The ideas aren't the challenge, it's being able to bring them to life.

[----]

You need at least one untextured AK47-Render before you start your project.

Don't ask me why it is so, but hundreds of never completed games and mods that got started by people without knowing anything about programming had an AK-47-rendering in the beginning (and in the end).

[TerminX]

m96, on 19 June 2016 - 06:08 AM, said:

If I may ask why is an "ideas man" so frowned upon?

Any idiot with no experience can come up with ideas, but you need in-depth knowledge of the field you're working in to come up with good ideas. Without extensive experience you won't even be able to subconsciously filter out the ideas that would never work to implement or just wouldn't be any fun. There are a lot of things that sound awesome on paper or look good on the surface, but turn out to be incredibly poor when implemented into a game. You need to be able to tell the difference between what will work and what won't, and you need to be able to do it before someone wastes time implementing it; you don't get there without knowing a fair bit about every step involved in implementing any idea you come up with.

[Micky C]

m96, on 19 June 2016 - 06:08 AM, said:

If I may ask why is an "ideas man" so frowned upon?

In addition to what everyone else has said, when you come to a forum as an ideas man and want content-making people, who are perfectly capable of working on their own game/mod/TC to work on your idea, you're pretty much saying your idea is better than other people's. Or at the very least, good enough that people will like it and voluntarily choose to work on it over something of their own original interest.

However as has been said, since there's usually very little feasibility in what the ideas people bring to the table, it's rarely the case the idea is that practical to begin with.

In the majority of cases where the ideas people aren't capable of doing the work themselves or at least very much of it/to a high quality, others know that they're going to have an unfair amount of the work dumped on them. It's much, much better if the leader of the project has the ability to finish the project by themselves without the help of others, with everyone else simply speeding up the work.
This is the case with the AMC TC: James Stanfield can do everything; art, music, sound design, level design, coding. The full works. He's not entirely crap at it either. However there are maybe 3 or 4 other mappers working on the TC with him that shave off a few years of development time, or otherwise make each episode considerably bigger than it would otherwise be. Even then the mappers can do whatever they want so they end up working with their own ideas after all. The TC's certainly flexible enough to accommodate anything at this point.

[Carl Winslow]

I'm assuming that if a game was built on the EDuke32 base can't actually be sold commercially given the nature of the engine and it's copyright structure, correct?

This thought occurred to me as i was sort of toying with the idea of a 2.5d thing i wanted to experiment with, though I don't know if i want to try this or Gloome instead, since Build/Eduke's feature set is alot more powerful and varied.

[HulkNukem]

Gloome is good, however they are no longer working on it.

[Carl Winslow]

Ah, that's disheartening. A shame too, because I was really hoping to try and play with it and make a game.

...that still leaves my initial question open though. is Eduke32 a viable platform to make a game to sell or no?

[Hendricks266]

Sure, you just have to come to an agreement with us.

[Carl Winslow]

Alright. I'll keep that in mind then. for now I'll just figure out what it is I want to do.

[Fox]

Carl Winslow, on 02 July 2016 - 02:26 PM, said:

I'm assuming that if a game was built on the EDuke32 base can't actually be sold commercially given the nature of the engine and it's copyright structure, correct?

This thought occurred to me as i was sort of toying with the idea of a 2.5d thing i wanted to experiment with, though I don't know if i want to try this or Gloome instead, since Build/Eduke's feature set is alot more powerful and varied.

If you want to sell a game using Eduke32, you have to pay royalties to Ken Silverman and make a deal with the Eduke32 team. Obviously you cannot include any asset from Duke 3D. I would also advise to disable hard-coded behavior that is more specific such as player actions.