Best program to get into fangame making?

For Sonic fangames, in terms of community and support, MMF2 is more or less the standard. The vast majority of fangames are done with that tool, and several Sonic engines have been made for it (most notably Sonic Worlds). Ask an MMF-related question, and it's likely that someone will have an answer. If you were to go with Construct or Game Maker, you'll have less of a choice in premade engines and less support from the community.

All that said, MMF is very much an old/aging beast of a platform with all kinds of legacy cruft and weird quirks. Construct is basically a modern and open-source take on these types of game creators, and doesn't suffer from some of MMF's more obscure problems. The caveat (besides slightly higher system requirements) is that Construct is still beta quality while MMF is quite well-established despite its problems.

Barring the release of Taxman's RSDK, the truly best way to make the best quality Sonic games is to either hack existing games, or write code. These last options are the most difficult, and also the most rewarding.

Honestly though, any artistic/creative vision you have is far more important than the tools you use. Having the best tools in the world at your disposal will do you no good if, for example, you don't have some solid game design ideas or just a concrete concept of what the game should be. These kinds of things are separate from whatever tools/methods you use.

...a long answer to a simple question, but there you go!

 

Given my extensive use/reliance on MMF2 I'd probably be biased in giving my answer. Suffice it to say that the language or tools you choose don't really matter in the long run as long as your game is interesting.

 

I'd warn against GameMaker, at least. Every SAGE it's been my job to review a lot of SFGs for that-site-which-must-not-be-named, and every year I run in to anywhere from 3-5 games made in GM that just flat out don't work. If they don't just crash outright, I've also run in to a lot of GM games that work, but don't work properly.

For whatever reason, GameMaker just hates certain system configurations, and so far there have been a lot of theories as to what's causing it and why, and not a whole lot of proof. Nobody on the GameMaker development team seems to be much help, either, as it's a problem that's plagued GM for years and years and years.

 

Problem with GM is that a lot of people doesn't seem to know how to optimize.

 

I use MMF2 and I'm fine with it, albeit for making much simpler games. Though if you really need some confirmation on how good it is, well...

 

As a kneejerk reaction I'd recommend Game Maker, because a) it's what I use and b) with the right plug-ins and know-how it can do some pretty incredible things. However, the points that others bring up about compatibility issues (which I've never encountered myself) and the larger MMF2 community are sound.

The bastard part of me wants to say use GM anyway, because the less games made with Sonic Worlds the better off we'll all be. Seriously, it's dire.

But the three big ones aren't your only option. Stencyl came out recently, and looks pretty solid (especially for beginners). There shouldn't be compatibility issues with it, either, seeing as how it exports to Flash.

 

I prefer Construct Classic and Construct 2, personally. Though, Construct Classic can be rather buggy, its event system is nigh-superior to MMF2's - I have known many people who have used MMF2 first and then switched to Construct because it's so much better in that respect, and in a few others. Quite impressive for a project made by a few former MMF2 plugin makers who did it to learn more about C++.

Construct 2, at the moment, is indeed in beta with limited functionality, but with every new release, C2 is becoming closer to being even better than its predecessor, especially in stability. Once proper collisions are implemented, I will get started on a C2 version of Sonic Construct Worlds, myself, using the Custom Movement Behavior. HTML5's speed depends on the browser - right now, it's probably even better than Flash for web games (and will only get better!), and as a starting point for Construct 2's potential to be able to export games to virtually every platform under the sun, it's a good multi-platform start. And there will be a free version that isn't at all crippled in functionality, which won't raise the barrier of entry for fangame makers.

The main advantage MMF2 has, though, as previously stated, is that people have been using it longer, and there's been more support in the community. I plan on trying to change that, myself, to make it easier for fangame makers to have more options to choose from.

 

I don't think anyone has made a Sonic Engine for Stencyl or is planning too.

 

You should start using Construct Classic to get a feel of things first, since that has a LOT more functionality at the moment, but you should also be aware of the differences between the two, such as how variables work.

HTML5 is really only less limited in terms of inability to do 3D and shader effects and stuff like like. This wouldn't be an issue if WebGL was supported by all browsers, but since Microsoft doesn't want to touch anything to do with OpenGL with a ten-foot-pole, thus leaving IE users out of the loop, that's not an option for C2 implementation for now. In short, HTML5 is only limited in what kind of graphical things it can do.

 

In a nutshell

STENCYL:

Lots of talk about it being the best thing since sliced bread, not much has been shown to prove it. I've yet to see any sort of fangame use Stencyl as its IDE of choice. Probably not good for fangames at this stage.

CONSTRUCT:

I've not seen Construct in action either, but the thing that's most noticable about those YouTube videos is that they've clearly got fantastic artists and musicans on board. No IDE will offer you these things, which suggests the people producing the content are highly skilled. Highly skilled programmers can work with anything, so it's not neccessarily a sign that Construct is "good", but I've not used it so I may be wrong. The fangaming community as a whole doesn't use it, so support would be limited. It's unexplored territory. Perhaps worth exploring, but perhaps not.

GAME MAKER:

Game Maker is widely used by "newer" fangamers. I have this theory that the reason for this is because people put in stupid search terms in google (I.e. they wanted to "make" a "game" and thus "game maker" popped up). Game Maker is reasonably powerful - it can do some impressive things, but it is flawed in many, many aspects. It's slow, it creates bloated applications, and as far as actual programming goes... well... you can throw pretty much anything at it and it'll probably function. And because it doesn't demand semicolons at the end of lines or the "==" operator, you get a community that can't really program games.

Or rather, if you then shifted over to something like C/C++ or Java, half your code probably wouldn't work, because Game Maker doesn't train you to write code that's "good", it trains you to write code that's "good enough".

Sonic fangames don't seem to use Game Maker. Mario fangames do. There'll be pros and cons as to why, but essentially, it depends on your game. I don't like the bloated nature of Game Maker - it doesn't "feel good" to work with, whether you're a programmer or a user. Yes you can get around some of this stuff, but nobody ever does. I don't personally recommend Game Maker on the basis I don't personally like running Game Maker games, but others don't care.

Mario fangames are relatively easy to make as opposed to Sonic ones, because a Sonic fangame needs fancy 360 degree engines. It's more of a struggle to do those in Game Maker. But it's also more of a struggle to get the same level of precision needed with Mario in MMF2.

MULTIMEDIA FUSION 2/THE GAMES FACTORY 2:

MMF2 and its watered down cousin TGF2 tend to be used by Sonic fangamers. Little actual programming involved, and a community that's existed for a good ten years or more thanks to previous similar Clickteam products, and so the knowledge is spread and yada yada Sonic Worlds. An MMF2 application can do amazing things, but Clickteam have never been ones to get with the times, so it's "2006 amazing" as opposed to "regularly being updated to keep it cutting edge, amazing". You have to dish out cash to produce games, which is the major downfall. People used to pirate the older stuff (I.e. MMFE, TGF and MMF) but the older stuff is hideously broken and built with Windows 98 in mind, so don't do that.




really it depends on what you're comfortable with. I think history pairs a lot of people with Clickteam products, but emerging technolgies should be much better. And of course your pros will tell you to ditch them all and learn C++ or whatever.


I've stressed for a while that the best way forward would be to hack the hell out of the old TGF, kill a lot of the built-in limiters, fix the numerous bugs and leave it at that, though the legal concerns that surround it and the willingness for technical experts to do such a thing are pretty big obstacles. If you wanted to make your hardcore stuff it wouldn't be appropriate, but I think it would be the best choice for beginners and those who just want to make games for fun, quickly. Because Game Maker will give you crap and MMF2 will hurt your pockets if you're only wanting to make something "simple".

and "simple" is good in this situation. Spending years on building a fangame from scratch that won't guarantee you income needs a certain frame of mind. That's why you don't see many completed Sonic platformers.

 

And the event system is a massive turn-off. The Scratch system? Seriously? Also, Flash?

Construct Classic/Construct 2 are relatively new IDEs (and in C2's case, only in beta, its actual, proper release was literally just announced for August 22nd), so it's understandable why it isn't used much by fangamers. However, I have NEVER heard anyone say that they prefer MMF2's event system over Construct's, so that's a start.

Construct 2 has a TON of potential, much more than even its predecessor. The potential for exporting to any number of platforms, and HTML5 is rapidly improving in browsers to the point where it's only a matter of time until Flash becomes downright inferior for web games. Once C2's functionality improves, I don't doubt we'll be seeing HTML5 games looking as awesome as those videos.

 

I like Construct over MMF2 because it handles object instances WAY better. You can have two different private variables (Alternative Values) for one object. Same thing for direction and starting animation. I'm not liking those princes either. I'll stick with Construct Classic or move on to actual coding.
It's more expensive than MMF2 once it's all said and done.

 

It has nothing to do with that. How well Gamemaker in general performs varies greatly depending on certain elements of a system that can be very hard to change. My primary computer has a rather high end AMD Phenom II X4 processor and a moderately decent Radeon HD 5770, yet it grinds to a halt playing certain GM games that an old Core 2 Duo laptop will run at full frames with no effort whatsoever simply because on the one computer, an svchost container starts eating CPU like crazy. It doing heap validate calls over and over and it page faults like crazy. I'm talking like 35,000 page faults per second. On some GM games, they still run alright (notably Spelunky), but as they get more complex, it just becomes totally unmanageable. In fact, I can fix the performance issue just by killing the svchost process, but then Windows goes berserk, various drivers stop working including sound, and it tries to force itself to shutdown (which can be canceled fortunately). Unlike Linux there isn't really a good way to get stuff back to running properly afterwards either. I don't really know a proper fix. Oddly, just unplugging my mouse increases the frame rate by about 60% and

MMF2 has the advantage of at least being consistently shitty across all platforms.

That said, if compatibility isn't a primary concern, GM has way more control than MMF2 and its a lot faster to program with. I don't know if there is a major performance advantage... I've found pretty interesting ways of storing object references in MMF so that object selection doesn't become the obscene performance hit that it can be doing what people have traditionally done, but I'd much rather work in code than in MMF's cumbersome event format, especially when you start trying to do nested conditions which is a heinous pain in the ass with MMF.

 

Though I make 16:9 fangames, I am still one of the dozen or so people still running 4:3.

But I am probably in the minority. Still would be nice, though.

 

The number of people without widescreen monitors is getting pretty small these days. It really doesn't matter whether you do primarily 16:9 or 4:3 though since you can crop either to the other (or settle on some happy medium) and the only real impact it should have gameplay-wise is on various side to side differences like when you start having your various actors do their acting and such. For the record, 16:9 should take priority since left/right tend to be more important for that sort of thing than up and down.