Exploring Verge³

by Overkill

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A series of tutorials designed to teach you all the basics, essentials and tricks to make you be able to take on almost any task with Verge³, a freely downloadable game creation engine. Also, some random stuff that has relevance to Verge, but perhaps not so much learning.

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• Table of Contents
• Change Log
• References and Must-Reads
• Disclaimer
• Contact Me

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Table of Contents

Note that not all the tutorials in this list are written, so some may not be accessable when you mouse over their text.

• "First Things First" - Some things to go over before I'll go any further.
  • "Salutations!"
  • "What You'll Need"
  • "Verge.cfg"
  • "System.vc"
• "Programming? Code? Huh?" - Learn some basics about code. A big section, caked with horrible wordplay for titles. You don't have to read it all right away, but it's here for when you realize something you've done gives errors.
  • "Syntax"
  • "Brackets, Braces and Parentheses, oh my!"
  • "Comments"
  • "Variables"
  • "Operators, Math and Brackets."
  • "Next Time, You'll do it IF I say so or ELSE!"
  • "WHILE You're at it..."
  • "FOR Everything Else, There's Mastercard"
  • "Let's SWITCH Things Up a Bit"
  • "Functions"
  • "Preprocess This!"
  • "Naming and You"
  • "Tabs, Spaces and New Lines are Your Best Friends."
  • "Read the Docs"
  • "Don't Hesitate for Help!"
• "Talk to Me" - The textbox is probably an essential part of your game. Learn how to not only make a textbox, but make a spiffy one!
  • "All at Once"
    • Display all your text at once inside a box. Not very interesting, but it's a start.
  • "Scroll It"
    • Breath some animation into your textbox, don't flood the screen with overwhleming amounts of text.
  • "Wrap It, Yo'"
    • Instead of having a separate string argument for each line of text, use some string tokenizing action.
• "It's Your Choice" - Every game has a menu in some way or form. Learn how to make a basic, not-too-shabby menu for your game.
  • "Menus"
    • A simple, generic, yet functional menu.
  • "Smooth, Very Smooth."
    • The same as the above example, except with the addition of smooth scrolling cursors! Hooray.
  • "Ring Menus"
    • Games like Secret of Mana made use of awesome ring menus, but now you can too.
• "Defiling the File" - This tutorial breaks up Verge³'s file system to have you use it to the maximum.
  • "Get in Their Database and Kill Their Dudes."
    • A simple way to write stuff for an item system, and other systems that have tons of information to grab.
  • "Save the World!"
    • How to write your own save files! But, how also to keep your saves from being edittable easily.
• "Cartographers: It's Your World" - Learn how to use Maped3 effectively and also learn how to make your worlds look good, and create them to be explorable and enjoyable as well.
  • "Starting Off"
  • "It's All in the Tiles"
  • "Obstructions and Obstacles"
  • "Populate your World"
  • "Whoa, I Zoned Out..."
  • "Events and Map Code"
  • "Setting and Getting Tiles with VC"
• "Mathemaniacal" - A whole slew of mathematical stuff that may be found useful to some people.
  • "Head-on Collision"
    • A bunch of codes to see if two things are touching. Also makes use Pythagorean theorum to tell how far one spot is from another. The uses are plentiful.
  • "A Different Angle on Things."
    • Sines, cosines, and inverse tangents allow you to do fun angular movement.
  • "Do the Wave."
    • Sine and cosine mathematics grant even more fun movement with wavelike and circular patterns.

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Change Log

2005-04-26: Second section done. It took forever, it was pain. I also changed some things around with the CSS.
2005-04-12: First section done, after being distracted for a while with Paper Mario 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and real life.
2005-04-02: This project began.

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References and Must-Reads

A Beginner's Guide to Verge³ by Rysen.
Hello World by Zip.
CHRMak5 Documentation by Overkill.
MapEd3 Documentation by Overkill.

The Code Vault
The Verge FAQ
The Verge³ Manual

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Disclaimer

This tutorial is written to teach beginners about Verge³. As the author, I won't be held liable for inaccuracy of any information contained within these documents. However, please tell me if you spot mistakes, grammatical, codewise or otherwise and I will try my best to address them. I am not to be held liable for any problems Verge, or my code causes to your computer, but I can assure you these would not be intentional. Credit for the help I give you is appreciated, although not at all necessary.

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Contact Me

Want me to write what I know about another topic? Expand what I have? Correct my errors? Just want to say you liked or loathed my tutorial? Email me at: overkill9999 AT gmail DOT com.

If you please, you can also contact me on AIM as Minimum Overkill, on MSN as overkill9999 AT hotmail DOT com, or on IRC under irc://irc.esper.net/ in #verge or #vergehelp, usually under the nick Overkill.