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What’s the easiest thing to program?

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JacboyXCreated:
JacboyX#1
Platformers, Fighting Games, Shoot-em-ups, Dungeon Crawlers (PRG:GAME2RPG for example), or Puzzle Games? Comment below. PS: I don’t know where to submit polls, so I did this instead. (＞＿＜)
MZ952#2
On your list? Probably platformers. A simple collision and interaction system followed by a way to load in levels. The easiest? Probably text-based question games. You can create polls by hitting the [✓Poll] button when you comment on or create posts.
12Me21#3
I'd say probably shoot-em-ups, since SB was basically designed for that. There are tons of built in functions like SPANIM and SPHITSP and SPFUNC which are useful in shoot-em-ups and not many other types of games.
Yolkai#4
to make a good one: - shoot-em-up (easiest) - dungeon crawler - puzzle - platformer - fighting game (never good) to make a first barely-working one: - shoot-em-up (not much knowledge required) - dungeon crawler - fighting game - platformer - puzzle (a lot of knowledge required) to ship a late 80s/early 90s arcade title: - platformer (everything can be hacked together) - puzzle (the most important part is music and anime characters) - dungeon crawler (the most important part is designing stages with enemy configurations to sap quarters) - shmup (pretty sophisticated and impossible if you start with the wrong engine) - fighting game (anything less than hundreds of hours tuning is unplayable)
seggiepants#5
So, what is your current programming level? What kinds of things do you already know? Depending on that I might recommend a text mode program instead of one of them you listed. If I were to chose from the list, I would say a puzzle game is easiest (I am thinking something like 2048, Tetris, or Simon), followed by a single screen space ship shooter (like say space invaders), then maybe a scrolling space ship shooter. After that a dungeon crawler (although I would go more gauntlet than dungeon tanken), finally I would chose the platform game. I would say skip the fighting game unless you have the ability to get your hands on or make a ton of art assets and have a way of reasonably getting them into SmileBasic. It sounds like what you really want, is something like this list from gamefromscratch.com. It is pretty good as long as you are already comfortable with variables, arrays, for loops, while loops, repeat until loops, reading/writing files, functions, recursion, and text handling. https://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2013/08/01/Just-starting-out-what-games-should-I-make.aspx If you aren't comfortable with all of those you need to go back and study those first. For the text adventure game, you can look at this link (but skip the forward there is a bad word, however, chapters 1-15 seem clean, haven't read the rest yet) https://www.atariarchives.org/adventure/. You would of course have to adapt the code to smile basic instead of 80s Basic. I am also fond of the inventwithpython.com game programming books, specfically Invent your own Computer Games with Python http://inventwithpython.com/invent4thed/, and Making Games with Python and Pygame http://inventwithpython.com/pygame/ The first book has hangman and tic-tac-toe, the second book has a tetris clone. If you want youtube channel links, I like: Hope that is enough to get you (or anyone else with the same question) started in the right direction.
niconii#6
For the text adventure game, you can look at this link (but skip the forward there is a bad word, however, chapters 1-15 seem clean, haven't read the rest yet) https://www.atariarchives.org/adventure/. You would of course have to adapt the code to smile basic instead of 80s Basic.
What, "niggardly"? That word isn't related to the N-word, even though it sounds similar. It means "stingy; ungenerous".
seggiepants#7
I warn you about a bad word and you go look for it? Allow me to Picard facepalm for a bit. I guess it is my fault I should have left it out, I just thought it was a good resource. I apologize. Innocent or not I wouldn't use that word in public, sometimes sounding like something is enough to get you beat up or socially ostracized. Maybe you live somewhere nicer.
niconii#8
I was actually expecting the "bad word" to be some run-of-the-mill swear word, so I looked to see what you were talking about, since it seemed weird to me that you'd suggest skipping the foreword because of it when there's so much swearing on the Internet anyway. I do agree that using "niggardly" is probably a bad idea in practice, since it's not a common word and it's easy to cause bad misunderstandings. I just wanted to make it clear that it isn't actually a bad word, so you don't have to skip the whole foreword because of it.