UBON'S PROFILE

game maker is huge fun to use and even people who work in things like unity most of the time hold it up as a good prototyping tool

construct and stencyl are also quite good for that kind of thing. the choice more or less comes down to what you prefer to work in. game maker has a proprietary scripting language, stencyl works in actionscript (or haxe, if you have the beta version), and construct is just editor all the way (but still very versatile; this is being developed in it, for instance)

honestly, since a side-scrolling platformer is basically the archetypal indie game genre, most engines targeted at indie developers will be highly capable of making one. my advice is to try everything for a couple of days each, and then make your decision once you've got some idea of how each of them functions.

e: avoid Indie Game Maker, it's awful and enterbrain might try to make another one if we're not careful

ugh, I was afraid something like this would happen. there are a few different sorts of people who have the enthusiasm and conviction to make a big fan effort like an anime forum roleplay thing happen, and a lot of the time those traits overlap with inflexibility, monomania, flat-out paranoia, etc

I guess one of the things about building a world or adapting a setting or whatever is that it gets really tempting to start giving people hell for doing things the "wrong way"

and/or you get so wrapped up in your own self-insert mary sue that if there's the slightest possibility of someone else stealing the spotlight you wanna put the kibosh on that as soon as possible

tl;dr fuck nerds, go ahead and make a thing on this site, it's probably the course of action that will expose you to the least stupid nonsense

(true story, I had an awesome idea for a robot who ran on spicy food but when I asked for advice in the cbox I found out that I had entered a dimension made entirely of stupid "realism" arguments about a setting where not only is realism pretty damn loose but robots and cyborgs are already explicitly A Thing

(excuse the fuck out of me for not considering the logisitics of a curry robot, in this setting that contains a cyborg in a speedo who runs on fizzy drinks)

I'm hanging onto this zero for as long as I can

it's the only thing that sets me apart

no boy avatars allowed

I'm going to attach magnets to an rm user, ask them whether they're designing games for an audience or for their own enjoyment, and generate free electricity