Anybody know some good guides for Macromedia Director 3/4?

[returningmacuser]

I want to try my hand at some conversions of a few contemporary (mostly freeware) 2D indie games for 68000/68020/entry level 68030 Macs. Some I've been thinking of doing are:

VVVVVV

Forget-me-Not

Thomas Was Alone

Daymare Cat: http://www.pastelportal.com/daymare_town/index.php?id=dmt_cat

Mega Man Unlimited

2x0ng

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure (Oregon Trail as an unhinged arcade game)

^_^ (Single screen point-and-click adventure game about a werebunny. Irreverant humor.)

Less Than 3: http://www.gnomeslair.com/2011/05/3-less-than-three.html

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (but on the Compact B/W Macs. Not an Indie game or contemporary. )

Everything else I looked at seemed either difficult to grasp or too simplistic for my purposes, and I didn't want to subject people to the lengthy load times of Klik & Play for Mac. What, if any, good guides are there for me to use for this software? Or would Director be too slow/limited for my purposes?

 

[Mr. Ksoft]

I'm afraid I can't help but I wanted to at least say I support what you're doing! I don't know if conversions are the best idea, but you can do what you want. If you're not very familiar with developing games at all yet, maybe start a little simpler just to test the ropes. Don't get over ambitious. Director could be a viable tool, but I'm not sure it is requirements wise for Macs that are that old (probably better for 040s and PPC) but I know I've seen games made in it before. You might just have to try it and see. I'd take a poke at it myself if I had a copy.

I've been looking into a bit of Classic game developing as well, but haven't come up with much. I'm not exactly familiar enough with the C family to produce a game properly, let alone how to work within Mac OS APIs, so I've been hunting for simpler ways. Indeed I wouldn't recommend Klik & Play at all... I'm most familiar with its development style, but KnP is so old that making anything even remotely complicated would require a lot of creative hacks (even scrolling the playfield falls under that and it doesn't even have real global variables-- you'd have to use player score/lives variables which are very limited). Well, not to mention the Mac port makes it even worse by being buggy and slow. I do have a copy of REALbasic which seems like a viable development tool overall, but I've only made a few simple apps for testing so I don't really know how viable it is for games yet.

Good luck, though!