I Wanna Remake Merchant Prince

[Sol]

Alright, so... as stated, I kinda wanna remake Merchant Prince. Which is available for download around here somewhere.

For those of you who haven't played the game, it's basically a trader game [buy at one port, sell at another, repeat] with a number of sweet additions, such as the ability to be the friggin' pope and summon your own army, having senators with a council that can give you the ability to lead Venice's armies (main or naval), the ability to conquer a city so only those people of your choice can use it, etc.


I want to remake it. Badly. I've got a number of ideas that I feel would improve upon an already wonderful game (such as speeding up the automated trading, and adding "conquest" as a victory condition). Problem is, while I can program to an extent, I don't have the time nor focus to code this from scratch, regardless of how utterly simplistic the game is.


To break it down, I need some sort of development kit that is for tile-based games [wargames would work] or at least one that can be used to easily make one. Everything else I can manage myself.

Time is a factor. A disturbingly big factor.

Crap, I forgot.

It has to be free.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Game Maker. Older versions of it are free for download from the official site, and AFAIK it shouldn't have any problems with this sort of game.

[Sol]

I was tryin' to avoid gamemaker, as I have abit of a vendetta against "hay lets make a halfassed product and hope people throw money at us to get the rest of it" stuff.

Although I do admit Gamemaker isn't nearly as bad at doin' that.

[velik_m]

I heard great things about pygame (http://www.pygame.org).
XNA Game Studio (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx) is i belive also free.

Haven't tried any of them yet though.

[win98]

I would like to see the finished product as it sounds like a good project. I will watch this topic, good luck as coding takes alot of spare time.

[Reup]

It all depends on what language you're going to program in. But, you might wanna check http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_sea...ords=tile+based (http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=tile+based)
There's quite a list there!