Best program for making point and click game?

[Tarquinius]

I'm not sure if this warrants it's own thread, but I could use some guidance so thought I might post here.
I want to make a simple (but good-looking!) point and click game. I've looked around for a bit but not quite sure where to begin.
My first thought was to use flash, but I'm not sure that's prudent if I want to make a longer game and not just a small browser game.
Ideally, I'd like to spend as much time as possible on the creative parts, animation art etc, and do the bare minimum mechanicly to make it work and flow nice.
Anyone got any ideas?
thanks!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

I'd say, use unity, and just use the "Canvas" object to do everything. The Canvas in unity holds all the objects for the UI (user interface, or GUI for graphic). You can use it to show images, and to have buttons or invisible buttons or animated buttons (like an object, and then an object that is highlighted would be the most basic button, using the image to represent the button at different states). Depending on what kind of point and click game you want to make, I have some unity code that is designed to be drag and drop, and it uses the built in unity state machine to allow you to design a house and navigate through it, but really it is just a bunch of pictures of different rooms, and you can add objects too them but other than that it does not do much. I'm busy with other projects so I don't know if I provide further assistance. but feel free to ask coding questions. If you do it right, using the buttons to call/trigger functions, you don't have to touch code, but you probably will have to anyways if you want to make some sort of system or logic in the game.

note: if you wanted to do it properly, you wouldn't use the canvas because that is not the most efficient, using a 2D game object would allow for faster FPS but the objects are a bit more complex to deal with than just simple UI elements.

 

[polywog]

Make it in Flash, put it in Unity

 

[baka]

depends how advanced this game is, if its just pictures, animations and text, u can use html. that will work on any os and you need very little coding.
flash will stop support, so better stay away from it, but sure, u can make it in flash and convert it to html5 or unity.

 

[polywog]

depends how advanced this game is, if its just pictures, animations and text, u can use html. that will work on any os and you need very little coding.
flash will stop support, so better stay away from it, but sure, u can make it in flash and convert it to html5 or unity.

Have no fear, Flash will still be supported 50 years from now. the old Flash player is losing support, not Flash.

The most popular games for iPad are made in Flash.

 

[baka]

yeah, but it will get removed from the browsers, so people need to install it as plugin, maybe even from a 3rd party place.
its not convenient. but sure you can include the flash component with a executable that can handle OCX/NPAPI and run the flash offline.

 

[polywog]

yeah, but it will get removed from the browsers, so people need to install it as plugin, maybe even from a 3rd party place.
its not convenient. but sure you can include the flash component with a executable that can handle OCX/NPAPI and run the flash offline.

Adobe changed the name from Flash to Animate.

You must be registered to see the links

Unity runs flash files now, so there's no need for flash player.

 

[Tarquinius]

[...]

Thanks! I downloaded unity. Will try to see if I can get the hang of it.
Is it adviced to make everything in the canvas? Can I get away with it, or will there be severe performance hits? I don't mind a little bit of it if it makes my work faster/easier, I'm just worried the game will be unpleasant to play as an effect of this.

 

[polywog]

 

[Tarquinius]

Thanks! I'll have a look!

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Thanks! I downloaded unity. Will try to see if I can get the hang of it.
Is it adviced to make everything in the canvas? Can I get away with it, or will there be severe performance hits? I don't mind a little bit of it if it makes my work faster/easier, I'm just worried the game will be unpleasant to play as an effect of this.

The moment you go to unity and add in any UI object, the canvas will be automatically added to your scene, and the UI object is then put inside the canvas object, which you should be able to see in some form of file viewer like tree like structure.

I haven't had any issues with using canvas and performance tanking, at least not for simple images, simple animations, simple videos, and even simple 2D puppet rigs. The only difference is the true 2D pipeline is a bit more optimized in terms of how it handles draw call batching. Things you may have to handle manually if you use opengl with custom game engine or some html coding. I've used html to run javascript to run game engines, but I wouldn't recommend it, lots of low level coding.