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Thanks for the tips, guys. I'm afraid I have some sudden and project-changing news, however.

I discussed these options with my friend, whom I'm making this game with, and he told me he felt he wouldn't be much use to the project at this point. He doesn't have the spare time he used to, and told me he felt better leaving the project than making me wait and wait for his contributions. I was disheartened to hear this, but I nonetheless have lost no interest in continuing to pursue the project, or a variant of it. He's given me his full permission to use any and all of the characters and concepts we've come up with, and has wished me luck. I will miss his creativity, but I nonetheless understand his predicament.

Project wise, what this means is that 3D just doesn't seem feasible anymore. Even with two people it was a stretch, but now it's nigh impossible. So, 2D it is.

This leads me to a new question, different from those I've asked so far:

Is there any easy way to implement 2D skeletal animation in GLBasic? Cinematics I could always resort to .AVI videos, but I would still like to use it in-game, if at all possible. I could do it in another program I suppose, then take frames from it, but I worry that it would look off in comparison to the cinematics, or off in general.  It would be much easier if there was a way to directly implemented it into the programming.

Thanks, Slydog. I'm beginning to become a little concerned, though. Our games will be completely 3D and will require fluid and lifelike 3D movements. Is this going to be (overly) difficult using a system with nothing but keyframe animation (no skeleton), and no established physics engine?

Hmm. How big would you say is too big?

EDIT: A thought comes to mind. Would large games become more feasible if I learned a bit of C++ and used it inline in GLBasic? Would that allow me to use object oriented features without needing to know C++ by heart?

Thanks for the support and feedback, everyone! it's much appreciated. If this program has nothing else going for it (which certainly doesn't seem to be true!), it at least seems to have a fantastic and helpful community.

I've downloaded the free version of GLBasic and will start tinkering with it a bit in the near future. At the moment most of my focus is going into mastering PHP, in an attempt to get into freelance web designing (I'm pretty fluent in HTML and CSS already, but of course that's not saying too much). Bills come before leisure, not the other way around  . That said, I really do want to get these games made, sooner than later, and will devoting down time to learning the BASIC syntax.

Thanks again!

Yeah, I'm well aware of needing to take baby steps in reaching the end goal. In my head I have it worked out something like this :

- Learn base-level syntax
- Do several tutorials
- Make a couple simple demo games
- Make basic, individual aspects of the "real" game
- Build from, learn, revise

It's just that I want to make absolutely sure I'm not going to be wasting my time learning a language that will eventually dead end on me. I don't want to eventually hit a wall that makes what I want to do impossible.

The main game we're wanting to do, by the way, is a 2D platformer with stealth and puzzle elements in a fully 3D environment. It will at times have a lot of things happening on screen, and also have extensive cutscenes and voice acting. We've been working with and revising this concept for many years now. We have ideas for other games, but we want to do this one first for many reasons, not the least of which being that we think it would be the easiest to program (our other ideas are a city building-esque RTS game, which would require a lot of logic for the tech trees, and a 3D platformer/shooter).

Although we're mostly new to programming, a friend and I have some ambitious ideas for games. We really want to see them made, but we'd rather not spend years learning C++ or C#. It seems that GLBasic may be the answer to our problem.

But, what are its limitations in comparison to the "big" languages? We wan't to create serious, immersive games complete with decent quality 3D graphics, cutscenes and complex, varied gameplay. Maybe not quite to the level of the current generation of games, but something that could have commercially sold on the PS2.

I know this is a large undertaking any way it could be gone about, but can GLBasic as a language fully handle what we're wanting to do with it?

Thanks.