Ideal games and game development tools
In this article, we discuss how ideal video game and video game development
tool look like, in our opinion.
Questions
As you know, the goals of Opensource Game Studio are:
- creation of free video game development tools
- making video games with those tools
- preparing video game development tutorials
This time we asked ourselves two simple questions:
- What is an ideal video game?
- What is an ideal video game development tool?
The best answers we could think of are below.
Answer 1: A video game is ideal if it delivers maximum pleasure possible
While content is probably the most important aspect to keep a player invested
into the game, the technical side is the transport to deliver that content.
There are quite a few technical problems that may damage otherwise excellent content of a game:
- insufficient accessibility: the game does not run on your hardware
- insufficient optimization: the game is slow
- critical bugs: the game crashes from time to time
We work hard to make sure the games we create are accessible everywhere.
That's why we released
the second demonstration of OGS Mahjong 2 only for
the web: because you can run web version virtually anywhere.
Answer 2: A video game development tool is ideal if it lets you create a video game of your dream in the shortest time possible
Even though we put a lot of effort into sharing our knowledge through
guides and tutorials, we understand that those take a lot
of time to study. One can't possibly make even a simple video game like
Memory without performing the following steps:
- configure the development environment
- write code
- build an application
- debug the application
- repeat
write-build-debug steps as many times as necessary
Writing code and debugging are probably the ultimate forms of input and output
of any software, so we can't escape those. However, there are ways to
completely remove (or at least significantly decrease) the need for
development environment setup and build steps. And this is what we are
going to do in the coming months.
Our goal for the coming months is to create a video game development tool that
would allow any programmer (or sufficiently skilled person) to create the
Memory video game from scratch in an hour.
That's it for discussing how ideal video game and video game development tool
look like, in our opinion.
OGS Mahjong 2: Demo 2
We are glad to announce the release of the second demonstration of OGS Mahjong 2.
The purposes of this release were to refine our development techniques and
build a solid cross-platform foundation.
Release
Run the latest version of OGS Mahjong 2 in your web browser:
http://ogstudio.github.io/ogs-mahjong …
Read More
Examples and dependencies
This article describes two new OpenSceneGraph cross-platform examples and the
change in handling dependencies.
Examples of HTTP client and node selection
Once we finished working on the remote debugging example and
reported its completion, we were surprised by the fact
that secure HTTP connection between a debugged application and debug …
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Example-driven development
This article explains how the third OpenSceneGraph cross-platform example
opened our eyes to example-driven development.
2018-08 EDIT: the third example has been renamed to the fourth one due to
the reasons described in the next article.
The third OpenSceneGraph cross-platform example
The third OpenSceneGraph cross-platform example explains how to implement …
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OpenSceneGraph cross-platform examples
This article summarizes the work we did to produce the first two
cross-platform OpenSceneGraph examples.
By the time the first technology demonstration of OGS Mahjong 2
has been released, we've already had issue request
(to explain how to load images with OpenSceneGraph on Android) hanging for some
time. We considered …
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First techdemo of OGS Mahjong 2: Gameplay
We are glad to announce the release of the first technical demonstration of
OGS Mahjong 2. The purpose of this release was to verify gameplay across
supported platforms.
Get techdemo for your platform:
Read More
Mahjong recreation start
This article describes the start of Mahjong game recreation.
Plan
We started Mahjong recreation endeavour by composing a brief plan to get gameplay with minimal graphics:
- Load single layout
- Place tiles in layout positions
- Distinguish tiles
- Implement selection
- Implement matching
Just like any other plan, this one looked fine at …
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The year of lessons
So, the year 2017 is approaching its finale, the year's results have already
been summed up. We're going to take a break from igniting the fireworks or
preparation of the champagne so that we can designate our goal for the
following year.
As it may be clear from other articles …
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2017 summary
It's time to step back to see our accomplishments in 2017 and how they connect to the overall goal of Opensource Game Studio project.
Brief history
Opensource Game Studio project is 12 years old now.
2005. We started the project with a fanatic call to create the best game ever …
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Back to the Static
We have been using Wordpress as our website engine for more than seven years. And now it's time to move forward. Or backward.
For some time we've been tracking the development of the new breed of website engines - static site generators.
It seems that this is the technology capable of …
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