What program do I need to make my own video games?

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I'm thinking about getting Flash but I don't know which one to get. My parents would let me get the new $700 one. I've tried programs such as Reality Creator and Adventure Game Studio and couldn't even begin to get my head around them. The "tutorial" for adventure game studio made no sence to me and was just too long. I could read certian things until the cows come home and never understand the content. I don't want to go to game design school. I possibly may never be able even graduate high school or get a GED and even if I was able to go to game design school, I'd have to make the themes THEY want. I want to make meerkat themed games only. I want to make them for me. What Flash should I invest in? It was never written in the stars for me to become a computer programer so I need something simple that dosen't require an insane amount of reading.


I've been making video games with powerpoint since 2001. If I could find a way to design my own cursors and make them change into various things in powerpoint, I wouldn't really need a seperate game design program.

I'm not sure what a "meerkat game" is.

Usually "game-making" tools like RPG Maker are very limited in their scope, and all games resemble one another in look & feel.

Flash is a programming language, simplified, but still more complex to use than "game-making" tools.

If you're starting from zero... usually learning to make a game means learning how to program one. I would suggest trying Visual Basic Free Edition (http://www.microsoft.com/express/Windows/), and just figuring out how to use the controls, output text...

Make something where you click a button and text appears in a box.

Then you could load a couple of bitmaps and make the application respond to keypresses by moving them inside an Image control.

Then you figure out how to make one bitmap move away or toward the other, place obstructions... depending on what kind of game type you're prone toward.

I'm sure there are FAR better ways to learn, but I started with a flavor of BASIC in 1988, before moving on to others, and later, Visual Basic also helped me upgrade to Windows programming mentality.

Flash takes a long time to get good at.

But there are a lot of tutorials.

Well, there's always GAGS (the Generic Adventure Game Simulator)... j/k...it was for text adventures back in the 80s...you could write your own 'Zork' game...

If you want to make anything more complicated than crappy 2-D animation you will need to learn an actual programming language. I suggest starting with Python. It's pretty easy to learn and unlike a "program" it's free.

Python or processing. Both are free, cross platform, real programming languages and aimed at new people.

http://www.python.org/
http://processing.org/