Making a Game... Anyone else trying it?

[coldacid]

FPS Creator? Does such a thing truly exist?

[Guest poster]

I've worked on fangames for several years. I take care of the scripting of the games in the engine we're using and implement the stuff our artists, animators and musicians submit. I found that it often takes a certain kind of person to succeed in amateur game development. Talent is one thing, but commitment is equally important and often overlooked because of the butterfly stage in amateur game projects. One of our members once put it very nicely: "A lot of people like to write stuff or draw a picture from time to time, but very few people have the patience to draw hundreds and hundreds of pictures on a timely basis or write a 500+ page screenplay."

In several ways, an amateur game project is like a relationship. At first, everything is new, exciting and stimulating and it occupies your thoughts most of the day. After a few months, however, the butterflies start settling down and the adrenaline levels in your brain start diminishing. The trick is to keep a steady momentum even after the novelty factor wears off. At that point, you usually stop "doing it for the fans" (since the "let's check the visitor boards and see if there's any praise that can enable me to do some more work on the project today"-attitude just doesn't work in the long run) and you realize the reason you're spending so much time a day writing, drawing or composing is because you just want to finish something that you started.

[SirMax]

FPS Creator? Does such a thing truly exist?

Well, if you were patient enough, games like Fallout 3 with strong mod tools can be almost completely remade with just the core gameplay intact.

[coldacid]

FPS Creator? Does such a thing truly exist?

Well, if you were patient enough, games like Fallout 3 with strong mod tools can be almost completely remade with just the core gameplay intact.

That may be true, but the core of F3 and the TES games is still an RPG, and no amount of modding can really get rid of that. Better to just build a Source mod instead.

[Elroy]

Games like Half-Life have an immense amount of mods created for them. I've played quite a few, and with some, it's very easy to forget that what you're playing is a chopped Half-Life. If they're done well.

[Helsinki]

FPS Creator is quite a strange tool, you should look up some videos.
And for the games you guise are mentioning, they have different engines (Something no one mentions).
Such as Goldsrc (Half Life), Source (Half-Life 2, Portal, TF2, and L4D), Unreal 1,2, and 3 (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), and GameBryo (Oblivion and Fallout).

[coldacid]

To be fair to F3 and Oblivion, their engine really is more of a grandchild to Gamebryo. And not that easy to work with, even with all the great 1st and 3rd party tools. The other engines (well, Goldsrc, Source, and Unreal) are pretty decent and not that difficult to work with, and the supplied toolchain for Source is THE BEST.