Building games with Phrogram

I've been playing with Phrogram for the past few weeks. I absolutely love it. I've been a software developer for many years now, and I've always wanted to create a game to play with my children. I've done simple stuff like a math game to help Sabrina with her multiplication, but never a full on graphics based game. I guess that my time for programming projects outside of work is so limited that I really don't want to spend hours spelunking the depths of DirectX, just to create a simple game. Phrogram takes care of all of the DirectX stuff so I can concentrate on the game itself.

When I was younger, I had an Atari 2600 (Wow, am I dating myself). Each Atari game console came with a game called Combat. I loved Combat, especially the tank games. Each player had a tank and you roamed the screen shooting each other. My father and I spent hours playing together. So when I found Phrogram, Combat was the game I wanted to create.

Within a hour or so, I had a joystick controlled tank that you could move around the screen and shoot at a target. Remember this was a new system for me to learn and that hour includes creating my tank graphic. Try that with straight DirectX!

I had a problem though. Phrogram only supports one joystick. What was I to do? Create an AI of course! I did some research and was starting to write the code when Phrogram suddenly came out with support for multiple joysticks. Happy Day! I hope to have the game finished up this weekend. I'm still going to build that AI though.

In short, Phrogram is gets you huge bang for your buck. If you want to create some games without a huge time investment, try it out.