The Far Reaches Webcomic

Hey, all. I should begin by mentioning that I’m recovering slowly but surely from my car accident. Some idiot ran a red light and t-boned my car, hitting us in the driver’s side. I was driving. They had to rip the door off with the jaws of life and pull me out. Thankfully the xrays all showed that I didn’t break anything. But I’ve got a lot of injured muscles around my ribs which is slow to heal. So I’ve been taking a “recliner vacation”. My sister came away unhurt except for just being shaken up. So that’s my crazy experience.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Let’s talk game engines. There are a bunch of them out there and a lot of them I haven’t even heard of or haven’t taken seriously. Here are my favorite ones.

Ren’py: This is mainly for story-driven visual novels. It can also do dating sims and even RPGs but that requires a lot more programming in python. A visual novel is like a better class of “choose your own adventure”. The game engine does allow for more adventure game elements but it is a challenge to program it. This is perfect for telling an interactive graphic novel style game.

RPG Maker VX: This is mainly for making those fun RPGs with chibi character sprites that look like the classic Japanese console RPGs from the SNES. This newer version of RPG Maker supports 32-bit color and is also capable for using visual novel story-telling elements along with cut-scenes with the little characters. It’s great fun to use. This one is also perfect for telling a story and really making it come alive, even if the characters are really small. A number of commercial games have successfully been done using RPG Maker XP and VX.

AGS: Adventure Game Studio is for making classic point and click adventure games. It’s pretty cool although I haven’t been able to get AGS to work right on my laptop. These games rely more heavily on puzzles.

IG Maker: Indie Game Maker is brand new and allows the making of Zelda style action RPGs or side-scrolling games. I’m actually a little more fond of RPG Maker but this new game engine shows promise.

Unity: Unity is free and is awesome for doing 3d games. I haven’t actually tried programming in it as it seemed a bit more advanced to me. I kind of feel that real-time 3d is a little too much work. Still maybe some of you out there might be interested in playing around with it.

MMF2: Multimedia Fusion 2 is pretty cool and allows for creating all sorts of different kinds of games, but everything has to be programmed from scratch. Things like save game and inventory have to be built from scratch. MMF is better for action oriented games or adventure games as opposed to turn-based games.

So these are just some of the game engines I’m looking at and wanted to share with you. I’m still working on the story that I want to do. Story is the most important factor, but you have to have a good game engine too. If you know of any good game engines let me know.