Development platform

So I did some reading on the various development platforms available. They range from a "point and click" game creation studio, right down to barebones C++ coding.

I needed something that was reasonably powerful, yet easy(ish) to learn and use. Something that wouldn't take me weeks and weeks just to be able to open a viewport. This pretty much ruled out C++ and Java. Yes, they are both great dev platforms but the basics alone are pretty overwhelming. I want to create something, not get bogged down in the how's and why's of what makes a machine tick.

I did consider Microsoft VB (Visual Basic) but it seemed very restrictive graphically, and most of my ideas rotate around a non-text based game scenario. There are a couple of very impressive (and not too expensive) high level languages out there, which can be compiled down to low level code and give quite impressive results. I was torn between Blitz Basic and DarkBASIC Professional.

I have used DarkBASIC Classic in the past, so I was already edging towards DBPro as my choice, but having read a little more, I noticed that DBPro is very different to DBC. So I did a bit more reading. Both platforms are based on BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instructional Code) but to be honest, the word "Beginners" is a little bit of a misnomer because it can get pretty complicated in there!

In the end, DBPro won out. There is nothing wrong with Blitz Basic, but the sheer amount of support, resources, plugins and add-ons for DBPro won me over. Not to mention the support for Sprites, Shaders, PhysX and DirectX generally. It helped that there was a great offer on DBPro over at the official site (good timing or what?), so a quick blast with the credit card and a download later I am left with a fully installed and set up GUI with which to start work.

A blank canvas.