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View Full Version : Green Engine, planning stages


JeroMiya
2007.03.21, 04:38 PM
I've started a project for a simple 2D game development environment targeted for educational purposes (either someone learning on their own, or in a classroom environment). It's for my senior design class, and is my first stab at "agile" development. Right now we've got some initial documentation, a few classes, and some unit testing going on. You can find it here: http://greenengine.sf.net/

Basically, games consist of Entities, Behaviors, Messages, and a Scene. Entities are your moving game objects, like ships, bullets, etc.. that are drawn on screen. Behaviors attach to Entities, and define their movement through the Scene and their interaction with other Entities in the Scene. Messages are passed back and forth between Entities to facilitate interaction between Entities. Messages are also used by the system to communicate events to Behaviors, such as keyboard and mouse events.

The scripting language will provide methods for defining these components of the game, or using components from a library we will provide (for example, we may provide behaviors for applying forces to entities, or to do swarming behavior, etc..). We will also be providing example games that users can modify as they become more proficient.

Finally, we will be providing an IDE that users can optionally use to make the development and testing process easier.

-JeroMiya

igame3d
2007.03.21, 07:41 PM
Looks good, I sent your link to an academic who is compiling much information about games and education and will be attending some conferences this year.

Keep us posted.

JeroMiya
2007.03.22, 11:44 AM
We plan to have incremental releases, each with more functionality. By the end of this semester we will release version 1, which includes a rudimentary IDE, a basic scripting language parser/interpreter, and enough of the engine functionality to create some simple 2D games and scenes (pong, etc..).

Then development will likely be suspended over the summer, and then resumed in the fall semester, where we'll be working on version 2. This version will have the final scripting language interpreter/parser, a more advanced IDE with the live preview window, network support, live parsing/interpreting of scripts uploaded from clients, and a networked BattleBots game, written using the engine, which allows multiple student clients to connect to a central server, upload their battlebot AI scripts, and then watch all the students' battlebots fight to see who wrote the best AI scripts.

Of course, there will be many intermediate releases between version 0.0 and 1.0, and between 1.0 and 2.0.