iDevGames Forums

Planning to enter uDevGames, but can't decide which technology to build your game on? If you choose Stem, you'll be helping a fellow community member and essentially have another coder on your team taking care of many technical details.

For the last two years or so, I've been working on an open source game development framework. It's somewhat similar in nature to SDL, but with a more permissive license and a few different design goals. It has a C API, a Makefile-based build system, and support for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and iOS.

libstem.org has a diagram showing the current modules that the framework contains, as well as some of the future planned ones. There's also a link to the svn repository. Documentation will eventually be available from this site too.

If anyone is interested, I'd gladly offer interactive help with setting up/using the Stem framework in your game for the duration of the contest. I benefit by seeing where any sticking points are and being able to correct them, resulting in a more mature, user-friendly framework. You benefit by being able to get your game up and running very quickly on a solid (though still in development) foundation with a richer set of game development features than you'll get from system APIs. Everybody wins!

Some highlights:

• Seamless cross-platform compatibility. If you stick to a few guidelines, your code will build and run exactly the same on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and iOS.
• Stem aims to enable without being restrictive. You can mix and match between Stem and other libraries/APIs; if you don't like the way a particular module works, you can simply not use it.
• Project templates
• Gamepad support
• Ogg Vorbis audio with streaming support
• Easy OpenGL/OpenAL setup
• Static analysis for your code with clang and splint
• All libraries go through a rigorous unit testing process, so code that goes into the framework is rock solid
  

If this sounds like it would be up your alley, or if you have any questions, feel free to post here or contact me via PM.

I look forward to working with you during the contest!

- Alex

Awesome! Can't wait to see what comes out of this!

I would be all over this if I didn't already have some pyglet code thrown down.

On the other hand, I haven't really done anything and I was already going to interface with a hell of a lot of C code...

You may or may not see a Python binding from me. (And it would be Py3k, making it the only Py3k game library that isn't PyGame, i.e. doesn't suck. This sounds better and better...)