SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Well I will not learn or try to learn another computer language again. The stress and all that mind twisting logic stuff.
So this is it , I know there is always something new I'll have to learn and that's fine. starting from scratch again i just really don't want to do. So this is it it's AGK Studio all the way for me maybe because I can use it to do what I want.
More or less. This is it now, the learning is over and it's time to start making some cool stuff. All those ex STOS programmers this is where it's at now and BASIC has never been so good and it's getting better by the year.
  In the 80's BASIC WAS huge but was not great as it was too slow for most things. Not any more. I prefer BASIC to other languages as that is what I know most about and it is plenty fast enough for my needs. I tried to learn visual basic 2005 express edition and failed, it was horrible. STOS worked for me although I only made 1 game and it was  slow however I could see the potential. Whined forward a few years and here it is AGK Studio. If I had to stop using
AGK I think it would be Blast3D. But I hope it will not be necessary.  Is Blast3D   finished and downloadable ? 

If I could turn the clock back and change a few things in hindsight I would of only bothered with AGK and saved myself a couple of years of grief. I suppose it's been an experience and it's one of those things you have to learn for yourself. ( find a language that you like and stick with it ). I have used AGK for a couple of years and something to note is that it works. 

Quote from: Pfaber11 on August 29, 2023, 07:46:05I suppose it's been an experience and it's one of those things you have to learn for yourself. ( find a language that you like and stick with it )

i agree. after all these years, i am still using blitz3d and i manage to achieve the results that i want quite quickly, instead of having to learn a new language / interface again and again !

A last language?, never!  

Since I was 10 years old my journey with writing games in pure coding languages has been VIC-20 BASIC > TI-99/4a Extended BASIC > C64 BASIC > AMOS > AMOS Pro > QBASIC > BlitzBASIC > BlitzMax > GLBasic > AppGameKit.

AGK has the grim reaper standing behind it now and unfortunately pure BASIC game coding languages are becoming a thing of the past with just hobbyists keeping them alive.

..i don't think its wise choice to 'link' yourself exclusively to AGK, especially considering its development status at this very moment...as for me, PB seems to have it near all that is required to develop very wide variety of applications..Unity and PB seems to be my preferred choices at this very moment (never thought of Unity to be there, lol)..

I hear you never say never. For me if I were to move on it would be blast3d or a 3d version of Lua  . But I hope TGC can hang in there and all will be good.

I did try raylib with lua but could not get on with it .

AGK is on feature freeze now and relegated to keeping iOS and Android working. I feel that once it requires a lot of work to keep those working then they'll be classed as EOL. There is talk of a community supported version but to exactly what they release and how it'll work remains to be seen. 

On a personal level I'm happy to use AGK for desktop and will continue with it until it stops working on MacOS. Just because it's not going to be developed anymore it doesn't mean it'll suddenly just stop working...yet.

My entry for the game comp "Best of the 80's" ( International Kung-Fu+ ) was written in AGK and my proper 1st game using it for 3D. I did use AGK for a 3D asteroids game but that was super basic. It was a complete bitch in the very beginning getting anything working as it's very fussy on what it's happy with for models and animations.

If I ever was going to do another 3D game in AGK then I'm 100% going to be writing a few tools to save a lot of grief, for example a level editor so I can quickly play around with the standard positioning, scale, rotations, lighting, textures, shadows etc, so I don't have to faff about with coding, compiling, coding, compiling, repeat repeat, just to get a bunch of static models to look how I want it.

I'm slowly still playing around and getting used to Unity to which I only know the basics enough to do a simple game with and I've very briefly tinkered with Godot so there's two options. After that there's always GameMaker or C with a game library like SDL2 or RayLib. There'll always be something around to use for making games even if re-learning is a pain in the arse to begin with.

What ever happens in the future I'll always prefer to start with a blank screen and hammer away at the keys

QuoteWhat ever happens in the future I'll always prefer to start with a blank screen and hammer away at the keys

I completely agree! 

Quote from: Steve Elliott on December 21, 2023, 18:14:23

QuoteWhat ever happens in the future I'll always prefer to start with a blank screen and hammer away at the keys

I completely agree! 

Ditto!

Yes indeed I like to start with a blank canvas. I've been beavering around with this for 5 years now and things are good right now "knock on wood". Was it worth the time and effort, yes indeed and it was something I had wanted for a long time ( to be able to produce not bad games for PC ). I have surpassed where I thought I would ever get by a long way. In the beginning I thought I would only be doing 2D games but I was wrong about that and after a year with 2D I made the jump to 3D and am glad I did. 2D and 3D are great with AGK Studio.