question for any game programmers here
 

I've been getting to know game maker.. and it's all pretty easy to understand.. but it's fairly limited. What I really want to do is move to flash. I was wondering if there is anything to gain from sticking with game maker for a little while longer or if I should just give it up and move to flash already. I know the longer I get used to game maker the harder it will be to learn actionscript. So I've come to this intelligent, generally technologically-savy community to ask this.

I'm very ambitious. And I'm still working on learning 3ds max.. I'm not just DICKING you guys around and giving up on things I'm trying to learn.

Flash sucks learn C# or something

I've made a couple of simple flash/director games before but never messed with game maker. One of my games was a zombie survival and the other was airboat racing. It's easy to get the hang of actionscript since there are a lot of sites with sample coding for any kind of game imaginable. I say go for it!

Yeah, ActionScript is pretty great to get to grips with, considering it's all visual based and you can draw all the assets in-software. Don't get annoyed if it starts doing things by itself though, Flash does that too much.

flash would be good in that you can publish your game to the web really easily, and it is easy to add in your graphics and shit, but unless you are structuring your code properly you might run into a mess once you start doing more complicated stuff

but if you're just making a really simple game for now, go for it

if you don't care about publishing to the web you could try something like pygame or rubygame

if you want to do something 3d try out unity3d, it will already give you a full 3d engine that is browser embeddable, and you can get quite a bit done without too much knowledge (unity also used to be able to publish to iphone but i think apple may have stopped that recently)

if you learn C# and use the XNA framework, you can publish xbox games!

Yeah C#/XNA is one of the best gaming environments out there, truly. Flash is shit.

Also I took up Nintendo DS development for fun a few years ago, never really finished much but what I started was slick. It's in C++. If you're interested in that holla at me.

I second Unity3D, used that for an assignment at University this year and it kicks fucking ass. Especially since you're getting to grips with 3ds max, it's straight drag-and-drop with files to import.

I'm actually in the process of learning C# and the XNA Framework myself, and coming from a VB background, it's pretty sweet. XNA in particular really makes life easy for the most part - albeit it seems to take a bit of extra work to extend. I have to recommend it anyone looking to get a foot in - easy to learn and use.

It still took me like a month to write a simple pinball game in XNA. Maybe I'm just not very good at programming or something.