Visual Programming, mTropolis, Chipwits and Revolution

[Greg Smith]

I actually owned mTropolis when it first was released.  It was my next 
big project, trying to understand how to make interactive things with 
it.  Then I loaned it to a friend and never saw it again. Oh, well.  Of 
all of the drag and drop past solutions out there, that Chipwits thing 
really hits home, for me.  I am convinced that visually oriented people 
are never going to buy into textual, (with lots of abbreviations), 
representations of visual things.  Or, rather, they may buy into it, but 
they will hate every moment of it.  Programming is an exhausting 
pastime, and an even more exhausting occupation.  Just look at some of 
these guys after 30 years of it, if they last that long. (Please post 
your photos, here).

Making graphic things move and behave in predictable and unpredictable 
ways is, I believe, at the root of all modern game enjoyment.  There is 
a small segment of the playing population that couldn't care less about 
aesthetics and eye candy, but rather thrive on puzzle solving, but I 
don't think they are in the majority. And, I believe, if ever the 
graphically creative people, enmasse, are to become creators of games, 
including the logic part of it, the process of creating, itself, will 
have to be a lot of fun, and have a fast development cycle.  It is part 
of the personality type.

I never had the priveledge to play Chipwits, but I wish I had.

Ando Sonenblick has developed a somewhat visual authoring environment 
called SpriteStudio.  It is cheap and does a lot.  Unfortunately, for 
game type interactivity, one must wrap his brain around Lua - and the 
documentation set for SpriteStudio features only one game sample. You 
might take a look at it:

http://www.spritec.com

And, if you like what you see, you could learn to program in Lua with 
"Game Development with Lua", available at you local bookstore.

Did anybody like AxelEdge from Mindavenue?

Greg Smith