Vox Newman

Making Apps (Games) for Android, Windows and iPhone Smartphones | August 10, 2012

This is less of a blog and more of a plea. What I’m hoping is that some knowledgeable folk will find this blog and comment to help me out. I’d rather that than search through endless forums that are only tangeantially discussing what I’m looking for.

I’ve been considering for some time, the idea of making a video game. I guess, like others, that I’ve had this desire since I started playing story-driven games when I was a teen. I probably started to think about it seriously when Assasin’s Creed was released. That game seemed to me to be the flagship of a new era where gaming would incorporate good writing beyond just focusing on game-play and graphics.

I’ll interject here and state that this is my view and that I don’t want this to spark a debate about which games are well written and which aren’t. So, if you’re reading this, please be generous and keep your comments directed toward answering my question.

Which is this:

What is the easiest game engine to use that requires little (preferably no) programming and affords me the ability to easily place a finished game in the various app stores?

So far, my own research has led me to Corona SDK and RPG Maker. RPG Maker seems simple to use with drop-down menus, a library of graphics so I don’t have to create anything if I don’t want to and zero programming. Corona has abilities that I want that are missing from the former engine in that by paying for a license, you can publish the game in all the main app stores. The drawback is that it seems to need more programming than I want to do and requires creating or finding content.

So, it would be nice to find an engine that works like RPG Maker and has the above capabilities of Corona.

You see, I’m a firm believer that people are good at a few things and are great at 1 (rarely 2 or 3) things. I’m great at writing and know how to program and have a passable ability to generate graphics and I’m sure I could use tutorials to get by.

But the thing is, I don’t want to do that. I want to make games to showcase my ability to write those games and that’s it. I don’t want a job where I program or design. I might want one where I write one, however. And I mean as an independent or with a company.

This because I believe there are a great many people who are better than me at those things that I’m only good or passable at and,  therefore, those are the people who should be doing those things. Because while I could spend oodles of time figuring these things out, it would technically be a waste of my time because it would rob me of time spent on a thing in which I excel.

I’ll provide two examples to hammer down my point: I have some mechanical training and could train more. To this end I could fix my own car. But why would I when my mechanic already has a better ability to do so, and likely was more mechanically inclined in the first place? The second example is comic books: they began to be better written when they separated the duties of the writer and artist because the chances that someone is a great artist and a great writer is slim to none.

Anyway, the above is more my learned opinion and I’ll ignore any debate on that in the comments for this blog (another time, another place). All that I’m hoping for is that some helpful individual will steer me towards the game engine that meets my needs as I’ve laid them out.

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