Either such a thing doesn’t exist for home use, or else my Google-fu is weak. Earlier, it occurred to me, that since interactive DVD games exist, then maybe there’s a DVD programming language, or IDE, or something. But so far, the only thing I found seems to be for businesses.
So, is there anything out there for the average person to create their own interactive DVD games?
Not sure if there are any ‘off-the-shelf’ software products designed for creating interactive DVD games - DVD scripting doesn’t allow much in the way of programming freedom: most of the games you see are simply sequences of short movies and images with ‘hot-area’ buttons stitched together with a small amount of scripting. Take the media (video clips, images, sounds etc.) away and you’re not left with very much.
Professional DVD authoring houses either use Sonic Scenarist or DVD Studio Pro. It might be worth checking out a free trial of Adobe’s Encore DVD program to work out how the standard DVD scripting language works (IIRC, it’s close to JavaScript in terms of syntax).
I can’t imagine that, once you get used to it, creating game DVD’s the traditional way would be that hard, though it needs some investment in visuals to make it appealing.
Also, a quick search reveals that most of the ‘quiz’-style interactive DVDs out there are authored with DVD-Extra Studio, presumably because the standard DVD scripting base doesn’t support complex programming such as random number generation, caches etc (the kind of thing you’d need for decent-quality quiz/poker-style games). Sadly, the product page linked above doesn’t specify a price tag, so don’t expect it to be cheap! :eek:
Thank you for the links, and Yeah, the (non shareware) DVD authoring packages seem to run from $200(US) on up.
Oh yeah, and I didn’t even think to Google “DVD scripting”, glad you had that in your reply.