The program worked as advertised. I was alerted with an audible alarm when my stocks appeared in a press release at Yahoo's financial web site. I soon discovered that program could also email these alerts to me. This was great because now I could run program on my home PC using my full time broadband internet. My employer could not accuse me in any way of constantly being on internet at work.

Another one of those large toolbar buttons allows you to change watch mode to "Just Tell Me If The Web Pages I Specify Change". So Easy Web Page Watcher can also be set up to notify you when any changes or updates occur on web pages you specify. It does this by continuously downloading and comparing HTML file with initial HTML file recorded at start of watch session. If HTML file changes Easy Web Page Watcher notifies you. I soon had a use for this operating mode, I could now watch my Web Site's HTML log file for visitors. I subscribe to one of those services that provide you with an HTML log file that updates with visitor information everytime someone clicks on one of your web pages. Instead of constantly checking this HTML log file with my internet browser, I let Easy Web Page Watcher watch it for updates. It is a lot of fun to know immediately when someone visits your site.

Software: Easy Web Page Watcher Home Page: http://www.patdirienzo.com

Now that you have a fleshed out idea, it’s time to work out how this will all get put together. If you’ve gotten to this point and are worried that you’re going to have to spend years learning complex programming languages in order to implement your idea, fear not! Others have already done hard yards for you. There are many RAD (Rapid Application Development) Tools available for game creation, a number of which are available for free online. Some of them still require you to learn a ‘scripting language’ (a simplified programming language made for a specific task) but in general this isn’t too complicated or involved. I’ve compiled a brief list of some of these I have found at end of article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.

Well, that should be enough to get you started in creation of your game. The most important thing to remember once you’ve gotten this far is that you need to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and it fails, or they keep moving on to one new project after another without finishing anything. Start small, build a working (if simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage you will always have a huge number of things that you wish to change, fix etc. but you’ll get a great feeling from knowing that it is, in its way, finished.

From this point, you can start tweaking phase. Play your game a few times and ask others to do same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be better and change things here. At this stage, it is more important than ever to keep backups of previous versions so that if a change doesn’t work you can go back and try something different without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all new features, improve graphics and sounds, whatever you please, safe in knowledge that you’re working on a solid foundation.

When you’re happy with your game, why not share it with world? There are many cheap or free places out there for you to host your files on and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction into art of creating games. It’s a great deal of fun, and can open whole new avenues of creative expression for you to explore. Jump in and have fun!

Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net

Links: General Game Creation: (Tools that allow easy creation of many different game types) Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/

Adventure Games: (Games such as Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Space Quest etc.) Adventure Game Studio: http://www.bigbluecup.com AGAST: http://www.allitis.com/agast/ 3D Adventure Studio: http://3das.noeska.com/ ADRIFT (for text adventures): http://www.adrift.org.uk/

Role Playing Games (RPGs): (Games such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo) OHRPG: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/ RPG Toolit: http://www.toolkitzone.com/

Fighting Games: (Games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc.) KOF91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/ MUGEN (unfortunately site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html

Side-Scrolling Games: (Games such as 2D Mario Games, Sonic Hedgehog, Double Dragon etc.) The Scrolling Game Development Kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/

There are many others available as well. One particularly useful site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Also of note, although not freeware, are excellent game creation tools available by Clickteam at: http://www.clickteam.com/English/ Klik and Play and The Games Factory in particular are programs to have a look at and download free demos of.

If you really want to do things right and program game yourself, there are some excellent programming resources available at following locations:

Java Game Programming: http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/ http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1262.asp http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Java_Game_Programming/

Visual Basic Game Programming: http://markbutler.8m.com/vb-tutorial.htm

C++ Game Programming: http://www3.telus.net/alexander_russell/course_dx/introduction_dx.htm http://www.rit.edu/~jpw9607/tutorial.htm

General Information: http://www.gamedev.net/ http://www.gamasutra.com/