Hoping for the best - Game Editor questions.

[Eskalion]

Hello people.
First of all, i am terrible sorry for my grammar and spelling mistakes/errors. You must somehow endure all that if you wish to read this wall of text i am about to create right now.

You see, english is not my native. Actualy, i never even had any kind of english language teachings or classes. All my english knowledge comes directly from manga and anime, satelite TV, internet and games. Those were my only tutors. You know what they say: "Throw a pig into chickens den and soon she'll lay eggs"... or something (i actualy just made that up but i hope you get the point).

Well, so as we are officialy after this warning for all those grammar-nazi out there, i can propably get to the point.
You see, from like 16 years, or even more, i am gamer. And i very devoted one i might say. Ive played bazilion of games, and so with the time my taste grown solid and delicate.
Call me an old gaming fart but most of todays games i find missing something... The linearity, lack of challanges goals, games becoming more and more like a semi-interactive movies raher then games, poor story, "dead" game world, unfinished content ... i can go all night long with this. Perhaps some of you would agree with me, perhaps not.
Either way, looking for a new game ive found myself in a dead end. After so many years, i really know what i like and what i dislike, i know how things should be executed in order to make the player happy, and i perfectly know how the game developer can totaly ruin his creation and my day when i attempt to play his baby.
Ive searched and searched and found nothing that 100% fits my tastes. Then i come to a very dangerous but brave conclusions...
"If i want to play a game with all the goodies that i love and long for, i must create it myself".
You dont know me, if you would - you'll know how such sentence is my words can be near to impossible to accomplish. You see, i have no talent, skills or proper education - in programing. And i never had, and never will. With Wife, kids, LIFE, i have left that golden point when i could waste my time on learning such things like programing. i have left it long ago. I dont have my past open mind, or the time, or the focus.

So i started looking for a "tools" that perhaps will enable me to create games without making my brain splatter al over the place. I have found RPG Maker serie. And iwas delighted... till the point when i realised how limited and badly writen it is. So i switched to Construct, which is very smiliar to Multimedia Fussion 2 software. The engine is great... as long as you want to make a plain game. When ou aim for something more complex then pac-man, this is where the learning curve becomes very steep. Not because its so hard to code or organise. But because the engine is quite unforgivining. And suddenly, a very lain game eats 2giga of VRAM, or make you CPU freeze, or the engine just crashes on you. You always know something went wrong, but figuring out WHAT went wrong can take ages. At least for a non-programer, who is not used to programing way of thinking. So instead of actualy MAKING that damn game, you waste your time on neverending debugging your creation. Dont get me wrong, i am aware that such things like bugs and flowbreak are unavoidable. But i like when the game creating softwere designed for non-programers would also take into account the simple mistakes a non-programer might do.

Then ive heard about Game Editor. To quote some people... "GE is as artist friendly as it can be".
Sounds nice but life has teached me that bigger the words are - the more are they empty. But i decided to come over here and face the truth, whatever it may be.

What game i want to make? Actualy i already started and had switched engines twice. So far i am working on it from 4 months.
Its a very weird mixture of Space Exploration and Space sim.
You walk around your ship in 2D side scroling/adventure game style.
You fly around in space and planets in style of Starscape or just topdown.
You move around planets surface in isometric/topdown view mix
You fight other ships and creatures in 2d side view.

So yea, at this point it should be obvious - i am aiming for a 2d, maybe 2.5d game.

And i am a terrible sucker in terms of programing. I am a descent writer, not that bad graphic artist. My talents are a totlay diffrent nature then numbers, codes or scripts. But i am also not that stupid. And if the reward is high enough i will try too climb the hill of learning GE. But i cant do it alone.

So to cut the chase:

1. How artist-friendly is GE compared to GameMaker/Construct/RPG Maker and other prototyping tools?
2. can i place 3d object in GE and make then rotate (think: rotating planets)
3. Does it supports instance looping think: looped coridor)
4. Is it able to play video files from ingame as a part of the scenery? (think: AVI object displayed on ingame wall)
5. How gentle GE is for a non-programer? (think: cutting the codding proces so the artist cannot make too many too crusial errors and find himself in deep butthhole)
6. Assuming that when i was young i was hit in the head and also i have a brain tumor - how long it will take me to learn GE?

Optional 8.
Is there someone, brave or stupid enough to take care of me and be my tutor in world of GE at least until ill grasp what-go-where?
(i am aware how naive the last request/question is. But then again, asking doesnt cost. at worst - ill just hear "No")

as for people that might be interested about my game i have some links for you:

My section over SpaceSimCentral http://www.spacesimcentral.com/hidden-space-f63/
my near-dead dev blog http://hiddenspace.blog.com/

as you see, i am not a profesional. in roots, i am just a gamer who tries to deliver something that the game developers wouldnt.

Best Regards
Eskalion

[DarkParadox]

1. If this means how easy it is to put in images.. Game-Editor is easily better than game-maker. I honestly don't know what artist-friendly means.
2. GE doesn't support 3D objects... only 2D images.
3. You can clone an actor as much as you want, or have an image repeat indefinitely in any direction.
4. GE can't natively play .AVI or other video files, but.. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6060
5/6. I started using GE at 10 with absolutely no programming language experience, it took me about 1-2 years to completely learn and memorize the whole C language, but afterwards you can learn any other programming language a lot easier, and you get to brag. Along the way there's good tutorials included in the program, and everyone here is pretty helpful. Now, if I could start out on this at 10 years old, I would think it's pretty gentle to non-programmers.

What game i want to make? Actualy i already started and had switched engines twice. So far i am working on it from 4 months.
Its a very weird mixture of Space Exploration and Space sim.
You walk around your ship in 2D side scroling/adventure game style.
You fly around in space and planets in style of Starscape or just topdown.
You move around planets surface in isometric/topdown view mix
You fight other ships and creatures in 2d side view.

The hardest one here would be Isometric, but the rest should decently easy enough, but you can't just wander around GE and make a great game without knowing the C programming language. You really need to actually try to learn it.

[NightOfHorror]

if i'm right this does have ways to make a 3Deffect

[zxcvbnm]

tutorials page will help you
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8680&p=60655&hilit=step+by+step+tutorials+page#p60655

[lcl]

if i'm right this does have ways to make a 3Deffect

3D effect and 3D object is two different things.

[NightOfHorror]

i know but.....