[Kde-games-devel] The Future of Game Development in KDE

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 20:27:58 Arturo Silva wrote:
> Should also note that Ren'Py is another reasonably easy-to-use game
> development system, even though that one is specific to graphic
> novels.  ;)
> 
> http://www.renpy.org/
> 
> I myself am primarily an artist and document writer, and while I've
> long had ambitions of creating my own games, I can never seem to
> concentrate as well looking at C++ or Java code as much as I do while
> staring at Inkscape.
> 
> So I do have an inherent bias in favor of a solution that presumably
> would allow me to assemble, say, a quick, dirty and KDE-compatible
> Memory or Frogger game by myself without much work beyond drawing the
> graphics, setting the sounds, assigning the keymap and mouse click
> functions, and writting the help files for it.
> 
> Naturally just using the simple GUI features would result in a
> playable but very-limited game -- but as long as I could get the game
> up and running, perhaps I would have enough morale to dive deeper into
> the toolset and underlying code, and add incremental sophistication to
> it.
> 
> So even if the tool is still in its infancy, from my vantage point
> it's a sound idea or at the very least a potential very FUN program to
> use.  I'm all for it, as that's in part my dream as well.  :)

  That is indeed the goal (i have just finished writing the first bit of stuff 
about my idea for game object structures, very inspired by Unity3D's version 
of it, which already shows the potential for something of what you describe 
above). If you wanna read:
  http://gluon.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=GameObject_Hierachy
  It's fairly code-ey, so i dunno how hot you'd be on it, but... :)

> ============
> 
> However, I should note that while I did manage to build Gluon in order
> to install Granatier, I have not been able to successfully build
> Granatier itself so I still have no idea what a game built with Gluon
> would look like
> 
> Moreover, would I need to build Gluon Creator via Git and if so will I
> be able to get comprehensive instructions for doing so?  These are
> just rhetorical questions -- I actually do have some stomach to use
> Make commands.
> 
> But if you do want the program to be friendly to non-coders, the
> development of Gluon Creator itself should be equally friendly, and
> "massage" the prospective user that may share your vision [but not
> your knowledge or patience].  :D
> 
> The glittery graphics are a good start (artistic bias here... ^^' )!
> But if possible/feasible, I might also suggest offering binary
> packages for the major KDE4 distributions of your milestone snapshots.
>  Take it from me, it's psychologically-reassuring to use a program
> that installs easily even if the functionality is still suspect. ^^b

  This is very true, very much so as well - and it is somewhere OpenSuse's 
Factory might be able to help us out a bit... A bit of thought and one would 
be able to set up a daily build of the source on there, so that people would 
be able to use it without having to poke about with the, to many people, quite 
scary make commands :) Especially considering the target audience you 
basically described above - not so much yourself, but the devil's advocate you 
of course ;)

-- 
..Dan // Leinir..
http://leinir.dk/

                          Co-
                            existence
                          or no
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