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[Terry]

Well hey, you guys are lucky. I take it instead of learning to program, you've taught yourself how to produce music on a computer (something I'm hopeless at, despite being an alrite guitar player) or how to make pixel art (something I'm just hopeless at, full stop).You don't really *need* to be able to code to make games. Believe me, it's like, the least important part of the whole thing.

[bigbossSNK]

If you really have absolutely no experience in programming, yet you'd still like to prototype something really quick, you can always try Scratch. You won't build any parallax scrolling platformers with it, but you can serve a Pong clone within the first two hours. :D

[sega]

Well hey, you guys are lucky. I take it instead of learning to program, you've taught yourself how to produce music on a computer (something I'm hopeless at, despite being an alrite guitar player) or how to make pixel art (something I'm just hopeless at, full stop).You don't really *need* to be able to code to make games. Believe me, it's like, the least important part of the whole thing.

Unless you are lacking so much in coding knowledge that you can't even get your art to interact with anything.  Music and graphics are awesome and all, but it doesn't go far when prototyping.  You can make a program where you move a red box, interacting with blue boxes, with no music, and still have a game.  If you draw and animate 100s of awesome characters, with 40 tracks of top notch music, yet still can't get them to show up in any interactive form, you have no game.

I'm just saying that a little bit of coding knowledge may go a long way, but that doesn't make it the least important.  Most scripting languages do assume some coding knowledge.  Anyway, I consider scripting a TYPE of coding, even if it's made to simplify the process.

It sucks that I've failed in the past to get to that basic level of skill/knowledge to illustrate the majority of my simple 2D game ideas.  I plan on trying once again to fix that soon.  I don't consider myself stupid, and I always was ahead of the rest of the class when learning maths in my tiny high school, but I guess I've been going about things in a wrong way or something.  Or I expect myself to pick it up more quickly than I am, so I move too far ahead of myself too quickly.  Whatever it is, it wasn't working in the past.  I'm going to try a different plan of attack this time.

[Alex May]

I have to agree that the fundamentals of game coding, especially at the level required for most indie (or whatever, freeware) games, should be a feasible goal for anyone here. You can segue into it by starting with basic stuff (even BASIC) and moving up. I'm self-taught. You know? Start with Game Maker or something. some scripting... luaplayer maybe...

It's just logic. If the player hit this thing then kill the player. reduce number of lives. if lives equals zero it's game over. if game over then run this drawing routine (draw a gravestone) instead of the game drawing routine. and play the solemn music. it's just logic. yes, I have been drinking.

[Impossible]

This is pretty much a problem for everyone.  Every artist wishes he could code, and every coder wants to be a better artist. Although the positive self improvement people will tell you "anyone can learn anything!" not everyone actually wants to or can put in the time and effort required to learn. While I do think everyone can become a competent artist and learn a little programming, the amount of time and effort it takes to become an expert at either one is restrictive.  As someone that has done both I don't understand people that say "I just can't draw" or "I just can't understand programming" IMO they're just not trying hard enough, but that also probably means they don't want to put forth the effort either.

As a lone developer it sucks to be a great coder and have zero artistic skills, but like Sega said, at least you CAN make a game.  Someone with art or music skills and zero coding ability can make mockups or soundtracks (which usually have much more emotional impact than some programmer's shitty game... but that's another thing), but has no ability to create a working game, which I imagine is a worse situation than creating games with shitty art. Once you have some minor coding abilities programming becomes much less important as Echo mentioned.  Many of the best indie games are made by people that are good artists with some minor technical skills.  As long as you have some method of moving your images on the screen you can make a great game.  People (for the most part) will respond much more favorable to simple games with great artwork than the same game with bad, abstract or minimalist art.  Being a great coder with tons of technical knowledge doesn't empower you much more because doing anything complicated takes a ton of time, and you usually can't produce content to feed that technology.  Considering the quality of tools out there you don't have to have amazing technical skills to make a great game.  There are no such equivalent "easy art tools" of that quality that exist for programmers. 

While I'm a better artist than many coders, I generally get "wow, your programmer art is great!" which is funny, because if I was just an artist with no programming ability I guess I'd just be a bad artist. At this point I'd swap my programming skills and art skills in a heart beat. As a pretty good artist and a mediocre programmer I imagine I could make much more appealing games than I do as a mediocre artist and a pretty good programmer.

[Xion]

I've tried programming...three or four times before, with, respectively, Visual Basic, C++, and Proce55ing. Each time, I started with the basics, which had terms I didn't understand, and when I looked up the meanings, they were described with more terms I didn't understand, and by the end of the first two days or so of effort, I was left no farther along than I started at, and feeling like a retard to boot, not even being able to comprehend the most basic terms or functions. I'm still mustering up my will for a second go at processing.

...you are lacking so much in coding knowledge that you can't even get your art to interact with anything.  Music and graphics are awesome and all, but it doesn't go far when prototyping.  You can make a program where you move a red box, interacting with blue boxes, with no music, and still have a game.  If you draw and animate 100s of awesome characters, with 40 tracks of top notch music, yet still can't get them to show up in any interactive form, you have no game.

Yes. And it makes me feel so hollow inside.

[Derek]

I have a computer science degree, but I prefer to leave the coding to people with more natural talent.

That said, I think it's pretty easy these days for an artist to make a game without having programming knowledge and I was doing it long before I learned C or Java or what have you.  And programmers have been making games with "programmer art" since the dawn of gaming... but really, if anyone needs help with either end, that's what the forums are for!  I'd love to see more collaborations pop up on the boards.  Or even getting people to help with the polish.

Also, Alec told me he was interested in writing a programming tutorial geared specifically toward non-programmers (it's amazing how many programming tutorials out there just assume you know things, or tell you to fill in the blanks yourself).  So yeah, maybe when Aquaria's done.

[Alec]

when i was 12 id just make myself myst-clones with hypercard on my mac classic.

HyperCard was fuckin awesome.

My dad would bring me and my brother this Powerbook from his school (he's a teacher) and we'd make games together with HyperCard.



You couldn't have any independently moving objects in HC (everything was frame by frame with "cards") - except buttons - so my brother and I made a platform game called "Adventure Agents" by using 1 bit 16x16 icons on moving translucent buttons for animations.

[Pigbuster]

I was somehow gifted with a multitude of artistic abilities.
But even so, I still have a number of shortcomings.

I can write dialogue and plotlines like nobody's business, but I cannot write descriptive narration at all, so there's no way I can write a book or anything.

I can compose music on the piano, but I have a hard time making them into full accompanied arrangements on the computer (Which is why I haven't submitted anything to the theme music thread yet). I'm definitely gonna have to learn this.

And I'm also rather bad at level design. I can make environments fit for exploration, but I can't create puzzles for the life of me.

I was on the "Can't code" train a couple years ago, but I have figured out how to write Actionscript since then. AS is one of the few things I can just sit down and work on for hours on end (Which is quite good when compared to animating, in which I work on something for 5 minutes before giving up).

A vector-based collision engine I have made.
http://img53.imageshack.us/img53/5816/platformthing2op0.swf

Ironically, I'm currently working on giving that code a complete overhaul. That makes this the 5th time I have rewritten a platformer from the ground up.

Also, Alec told me he was interested in writing a programming tutorial geared specifically toward non-programmers (it's amazing how many programming tutorials out there just assume you know things, or tell you to fill in the blanks yourself).  So yeah, maybe when Aquaria's done.

Oh MAN. I can't stand programming tutorials.
There are so many of them around the internet, yet so few of them are any good.

If you make one, I bet it would be excellent, even if it isn't focused on Actionscript.

[ravuya]

You couldn't have any independently moving objects in HC (everything was frame by frame with "cards") - except buttons - so my brother and I made a platform game called "Adventure Agents" by using 1 bit 16x16 icons on moving translucent buttons for animations.

It wasn't until much later that I discovered that HyperCard actually had an OO interface to the whole QuickDraw subsystem, so you could use pens and the regular QuickDraw tools to render inside a HyperCard context. 

Ah, the foibles of youth.

[Alec]

Oo really, which version?

[ravuya]

According to the book I had back then (and never really read), it was v1.2 (the original). I was rolling v2.3 around the time I put my old Mac into mothballs. Even if I had known about this, I never would've been able to really use it... I never could figure out how to keep the cursor keys from changing cards.



68020 for-evah.

[Alec]

Damn...

Gotta find me an ol' Mac with HyperCard and play around in it again. One of these days...

[Xion]

A question somewhat pertinent, I believe:
Would it be easier for a programmer to supervise a team in the making of a game than an artist?

[Chris Whitman]

I think it really depends on the kind of team and the kind of project.

Certainly, a programmer is bound to have a better understanding of the technical limitations and requirements, but he might not necessarily be better at judging the aesthetic direction the project is moving in. Of course, just because you're a programmer doesn't mean you can't necessarily tell which pictures are pretty or ugly, and just because you're an artist doesn't necessarily mean you don't know what a physics solver is.

I don't necessarily think there's a correlation between chosen discipline and ability to manage a particular project, essentially.