Thread: Does anyone know of a fighting video game maker usable on a home PC?

It coyuld be as simple as Flash, though 3-D (or even Mortal Kombat style spriting) would be preferred. Sort of like RPGMaker, only for arcade combat games.

Are there any of this sort of program available for home use? Or are ighting games just made from the ground up, and nobody bothered making a starter program?

3D = No. Especially if you've never made games before. Game Maker is good, but you have to build from scratch. It's still really easy to make games if you catch on to things quick. Flash is also a good choice, but harder to learn and kind of different. I've never heard of a program dedicated to making fighting games though.

DarkBasic would be a good place to start. It's fairly simple, but after a while you might want to migrate to C++ and OpenGL.

There are various graphics rendering engines available
OGRE is probably the best known of these

These are not "game makers" - such a thing isn't really realistic
like "film making" software isn't realistic
you produce a film, or you don't
you produce a game, or you don't
Software can't make one for you

You can, however, let software automate some of the donkey work and deal with things at a "higher level"

Yeah, you won't find a good game maker, such a thing would be impossible to build. There are things like that out there: GameMaker, FPSCreator, but they are terrible compared to real games with custom engines. Making things general makes the software slow, game software is extremely specialized code.

Because things for builders need to be general, they include good programming practices. Things like smart pointers, getters and setters. Game engines don't use any of that, it's fast and very dirty.

That's why I recommend Darkbasic to start. It handles the interface with directx for you, it also has a package called dark ai, which will handle things like A* routines and stuff for you.

Nobody mentioned MUGEN yet? It's incredibly customizable, basically a game with open game engine, and free. It can even be used to make platformers, shooters, puzzle games etc., though it's primarily a fighting engine. Captures the arcade feeling perfectly. Also a huge community cos it's practically the best solution. Since I figure you don't want to create Street Fighter 5 but wanna get down and dirty with creating stages, characters, moves etc., it should be sufficient.
Because quite honestly, creating all the art for a game is already plenty of work.

Check it out







If you're looking to create a game that even only remotely resembles the typical 2D brawler, then this is the way to go since you'll be some 100 times faster than actually coding the game yourself.

Other engines are in development as well, for example ShugenDo which will support native online multiplayer, a feature that MUGEN is lacking unfortunately (though there are workarounds) - http://www.sakirsoft.com/cms/index.php . Not available though.