Indie development?

[Enigma]

Hi,

I was asked at work today if GLB was good enough to be used for Indie games development. He is aware of BlitzMax and the successes some people have had with it and wanted to know about GLB. As I'm no expert and I didn't want to give him any untrue details about GLB to answer his question, I thought I would as you guys for your thoughts.

[PeeJay]

In my mind, any language is perfectly capable of creating marketable software, depending on the ability of the coder. It is also very true that the sort of people who ask questions like that generally don't have the ability to create a marketable product in the first place, and expect a package to magic them something out of thin air. Just my two cents ....

[Sebastian]

So far I worked with any "Indie" language you can find out there. PlayBasic, Blitz3D, BlitzMax, PureBasic, DarkBasicPro just to name a few. What makes GLBasic so special are the little things that you will not see in the first place like the bundled editors, the compile-for-all-plattforms-from-Windows feature, the outstanding support (try to get help from the creators of BlitzMax or DarkBasicPro, good luck).
As a programming language GLBasic is more than capable of creating Indie games. The problem is: there is no proof yet. Blitz3D had an enormous user base which led to an big userbase for BlitzMax from day one so it was to be expected that the veteran Indies would come up with remarkable games in short time. But BlitzMax is slowly developing, GLBasic has surpassed it already in almost any possible way (GLBasic has no Linux or Mac OS X editors and compilers yet and it's also quite limited in terms of object oriented programming).
I'd say:

- if you're after application software development -> take a look at PureBasic rather than BlitzMax
- if you're after 2D game development -> GLBasic
- if you're after 3D game development -> GLBasic

This my opinion. If object oriented programming paradigms are important then BlitzMax might be the best bet. But why don't take C# and ZweiDe instead? More power, less cost... So BlitzMax is pretty much useless in my opinion.