On 3/18/20 1:37 AM, bauss wrote:
> On Tuesday, 17 March 2020 at 23:09:32 UTC, Dennis wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 17 March 2020 at 22:47:43 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote:
>>> Dont trust that marketing, there is actually decent scripting in gamemaker, which you'll need if you get creative.
>>
>> Second that. GameMaker is how I got into programming at age 12, and look where I ended up ;)
> 
> Similar for me but not GameMaker but RPG Maker.

I've seen all your work on the language, and this is a pretty good endorsement.

Not sure if I'm ready to pay for it though, I want to make sure his motivation/drive is not going to fizzle out ;)

-steve

On Thursday, 19 March 2020 at 13:10:29 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Similar for me but not GameMaker but RPG Maker.
>
> I've seen all your work on the language, and this is a pretty good endorsement.
>
> Not sure if I'm ready to pay for it though, I want to make sure his motivation/drive is not going to fizzle out ;)

IME RPG Maker has bad support for animations and shines in mostly static turn based RPG battles. Some games try to do nontrivial animations, but they become very slow slideshows with many seconds between slides. Not sure which game he would prefer to make.

On Sunday, 15 March 2020 at 17:58:58 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I want to try and learn how to write 2d games. I'd prefer to do it with D.
>
> I've found a ton of tutorials on learning 2d gaming with other languages. Is there a place to look that uses D for learning? Should I just start with another language and then migrate to D later? Anyone recommend any specific tutorial/book?
>
> -Steve

Back in the 90s, when I was young, I learned a lot about game programming on MS DOS using allegro. That library is wonderful in that it allows you a lot of things that you need in a simple 2D game in a pretty straightforward fashion. It's really easy to get pleasing results with it. And it's still around, has become cross platform without losing its focus. And it has really decent D bindings.

The other library that comes close in both completeness and ease of use is PyGame, but this is Python only. It's a wrapper around all the SDL_* libraries (image, ttf, mixer, etc..), but done in such a nice way that it's usable in a very neat way from Python.

In response to Arine, I have to disagree regarding big hulking game engines. Learning how to properly use one of these game engines for a simple game is about as much effort as coding it from scratch and the later is much more useful as it teaches you the fundamentals of what is going on inside these big, scary monsters. The abstractions that Unity and UE4 build upon are useful for creating something fast, but you still require a really deep understanding to use them properly. These are tools for (semi-)professionals and there's an implicit expectation that you are at a pretty high proficiency level.

On Sunday, 15 March 2020 at 17:58:58 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I want to try and learn how to write 2d games. I'd prefer to do it with D.
>
> I've found a ton of tutorials on learning 2d gaming with other languages. Is there a place to look that uses D for learning? Should I just start with another language and then migrate to D later? Anyone recommend any specific tutorial/book?
>
> -Steve

I just leave this here: https://github.com/aferust/drawee
My hobby game has been implemented using just SDL and OpenGL (WIP). betterC, no game engines used, no bitmap textures (but planned). There is only one c linkage dependency (chipmunkd) for physics. I was planning to use only SDL, but I had to include OpenGl due to some performance reasons.