The dream of an open source RPG is over

In 2005 the Opensource Game Studio project started under the name of the Opensource RPG, because we wanted to create "the first competitive open free game". In 2011 right after releasing OGS Mahjong 0.7 we have already had the numbers that it would take us 540 years to create RPG.

In 2011 we had a dream that we as a team would grow, which could decrease 540 years to someting reasonable. However today in the end of 2023 it's clear we are unable to create RPG.. . .

In this article Michael shares his experience of creating durable applications.

In 2013 Canonical tried to crowdfund Ubuntu Edge smartphone. Its main feature could be the ability to use the smartphone as a full-fledged PС. Unfortunatly, the crowdfunding campaign did not accumulate enough money, so a dream of having a universal device remained to be the dream.

I've been searching for universality, too, on the software side, not the hardware one. Today I can confidently say I found the necessary. . .

In this article Michael shares his experience of using Git+JS.

Hi, folks, let me share my experience of creating an application to keep track of my spendings. Specifically, let me do it by answering the following questions:

1. Why keep track of spendings in an application?
2. Why did I create the application as a personal project?
3. Why does the project use Git+JS?

1. Why keep track of spendings in an application?

I, like many people out there, wanted to become rich and successful. To become rich, one is often advised to run a personal budget, that's what I started to do several years ago. I'd like to point out that running my personal budget hasn't made me rich and successful, and I increased income simply by moving to Moscow.. . .

In this article Michael shares his thoughts on teaching folks to program in 2019.

Preface

Autumn 2019 was the third time I participated as one of the teachers in the course to teach 10-15-year-old folks to program. The course took place from mid. September to mid. December. Each Saturday, we were studying from 10 AM to 12 PM. More details about the structure of each class and the game itself can be found in the 2018 article.

I have the following goals for conducting such courses:. . .

Anyone, who watches our progress long enough, can say that we restarted the development from scratch plenty of times.

Even before releasing "OGS Mahjong", we changed the underlying technology more than once. After that, we did it again several times, throwing away already completed features. It seems that right now we have less completed features than before the release of "OGS Mahjong". It's true, but not entirely.

When "OGS Mahjong" was released, we had a descent looking (for that moment) open-source game, that worked under Windows and Linux. With some luck and effort it still works today, but not out of the box.. . .

This article describes our first durable application for desktop PCs: PSKOV static site generator.

Durability

A durable application is an application that functions without a single change on operating systems released in years 2010-2030. In other words, a durable application has backward compatibility of 10 years and has the stability to run for 10 years. Actually, PSKOV runs even under Windows 2000, so PSKOV has backward compatibility of 19 years.. . .

In this article, we describe the beginning of our efforts to protect ourselves from third-party solutions.

Since day one of Opensource Game Studio project, we rely heavily on third-party solutions to help us achieve the goal of creating the best game development tools. To this date, we used forums, task trackers, mailing lists, social networks, code version control systems, hosting providers, compiler suites, libraries, and so on. Each third-party solution we used had its own lifespan.. . .

In this article, Michael shares his experience of teaching kids to program.

Here's what he covers:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans

Organization of the learning process

The learning process is conducted as part of corporate social responsibility: a company provides a room with equipment and connects employees that want to try themselves in the role of teachers with employees that want their kids educated. All this is done voluntarily.. . .

It was a year of reimagining and rethinking. As some of you may remember, we started this project to make a game development tool. During the years, the idea evolved from one form to another, sometimes the changes were significant, other times we threw away all the code and started anew.

As a result of all these changes, we came to the end of the year 2018 without a tool, but with a clear understanding of what tool are we making.

There are plenty of fine game development tools out there. Some of them are even open source. We spent plenty of time trying them, and some are quite good.. . .