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The Game Creators
The Game Creators Ltd (TGC; formerly Dark Basic Software Limited) is a British software house based in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, which specialises in software for video game development, originally for the Microsoft Windows platform. The company was established in March 1999 through a partnership between programmers Lee Bamber and Richard Vanner, who were joined by Meash Meakin in 2011 and Deborah Ascott-Jones in 2013.
DarkBASIC was released in the year 2000 as a game creation programming language with accompanying IDE and development tools. The language is a structured form of BASIC, similar to AMOS on the Amiga. The purpose of the language is video game creation using Microsoft's DirectX from a BASIC programming language. It is marketed for its ability to allow a novice game developer to make playable games after following its tutorials. It can create both 2D and 3D games by providing function libraries that enable a game to be programmed with considerably less code than with a language such as C++, especially without such dedicated libraries. The software consists of an IDE, debugger and interpreter, and an engine built on DirectX 7. The compiler emits bytecode that is appended to an interpreter to create a stand-alone executable. Star Wraith is an example of a game made with DarkBASIC.
In 2002, an updated version called DarkBASIC Professional was released that was able to use newer versions of DirectX. The earlier version of the software is now informally referred to as DarkBASIC Classic to distinguish the two products.[citation needed]
On 14 August 2008, the last DarkBASIC version (1.21) was released. Since the introduction of DarkBASIC Professional, The Game Creators have stated that there will be no further updates to the language, although it will still be sold.[citation needed]
In 2015, TGC lead developer Lee Bamber decided to open source DarkBASIC Professional for the community, to prevent it from becoming unsupported abandonware. The project and its source code are hosted (since start of 2016) under the MIT license on GitHub. The latest released freeware binary program was Dark Basic Pro Binary 120216 (2 December 2016), which included the activation of many previously commercial modules.
The 3D Gamemaker is a computer application developed by The Game Creators that allows users to make various genres of 3D games for Microsoft Windows. The tool is marketed as allowing users to create 3D games without programming and art skills. Games developed with 3D Gamemaker require at least a 400 MHz Pentium processor, 64 MiB of RAM and DirectX 7.0b to run. Alongside the full boxed release, The 3D Gamemaker was also released in a Lite edition, with fewer categories of assets available and a reduced feature set.
The software has a simple point-and-click interface which guides the user through the process of creating the game. The user chooses a scene from one of several different genres ("shooter", "horror", "war", "space", "driving", "jungle", "cartoon", or "silly"), and then chooses different characters, weapons, items, enemies and so on. The software includes hundreds of pre-made scenes and 3D objects. The software can also automatically generate a game by choosing random elements. The resulting game can be exported as a standalone Windows executable. The 3D Gamemaker has a built-in placement editor that allows the user to indicate where enemies, items, and obstacles go. This is not available in beginner mode or the lite edition. There is also, among other things, a simple level creator. It also includes the ability to import the user's own media.
Reviewing The 3D Gamemaker for GameSpy, Tricia Harris praised the software's ease-of-use but criticized the animation and "placement editor" systems.
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The Game Creators
The Game Creators Ltd (TGC; formerly Dark Basic Software Limited) is a British software house based in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, which specialises in software for video game development, originally for the Microsoft Windows platform. The company was established in March 1999 through a partnership between programmers Lee Bamber and Richard Vanner, who were joined by Meash Meakin in 2011 and Deborah Ascott-Jones in 2013.
DarkBASIC was released in the year 2000 as a game creation programming language with accompanying IDE and development tools. The language is a structured form of BASIC, similar to AMOS on the Amiga. The purpose of the language is video game creation using Microsoft's DirectX from a BASIC programming language. It is marketed for its ability to allow a novice game developer to make playable games after following its tutorials. It can create both 2D and 3D games by providing function libraries that enable a game to be programmed with considerably less code than with a language such as C++, especially without such dedicated libraries. The software consists of an IDE, debugger and interpreter, and an engine built on DirectX 7. The compiler emits bytecode that is appended to an interpreter to create a stand-alone executable. Star Wraith is an example of a game made with DarkBASIC.
In 2002, an updated version called DarkBASIC Professional was released that was able to use newer versions of DirectX. The earlier version of the software is now informally referred to as DarkBASIC Classic to distinguish the two products.[citation needed]
On 14 August 2008, the last DarkBASIC version (1.21) was released. Since the introduction of DarkBASIC Professional, The Game Creators have stated that there will be no further updates to the language, although it will still be sold.[citation needed]
In 2015, TGC lead developer Lee Bamber decided to open source DarkBASIC Professional for the community, to prevent it from becoming unsupported abandonware. The project and its source code are hosted (since start of 2016) under the MIT license on GitHub. The latest released freeware binary program was Dark Basic Pro Binary 120216 (2 December 2016), which included the activation of many previously commercial modules.
The 3D Gamemaker is a computer application developed by The Game Creators that allows users to make various genres of 3D games for Microsoft Windows. The tool is marketed as allowing users to create 3D games without programming and art skills. Games developed with 3D Gamemaker require at least a 400 MHz Pentium processor, 64 MiB of RAM and DirectX 7.0b to run. Alongside the full boxed release, The 3D Gamemaker was also released in a Lite edition, with fewer categories of assets available and a reduced feature set.
The software has a simple point-and-click interface which guides the user through the process of creating the game. The user chooses a scene from one of several different genres ("shooter", "horror", "war", "space", "driving", "jungle", "cartoon", or "silly"), and then chooses different characters, weapons, items, enemies and so on. The software includes hundreds of pre-made scenes and 3D objects. The software can also automatically generate a game by choosing random elements. The resulting game can be exported as a standalone Windows executable. The 3D Gamemaker has a built-in placement editor that allows the user to indicate where enemies, items, and obstacles go. This is not available in beginner mode or the lite edition. There is also, among other things, a simple level creator. It also includes the ability to import the user's own media.
Reviewing The 3D Gamemaker for GameSpy, Tricia Harris praised the software's ease-of-use but criticized the animation and "placement editor" systems.