Ingemar Ragnemalm, best known for writing the Sprite Animation Toolkit (SAT) and the book ‘Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus’ has released a new Mac OS X IDE called Lightweight IDE.
Lightweight IDE was written after the observation that IDEs have gotten more and more complex, to the result that it is a problem. The IDE is not always a help, it is a burden.
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Samuel Williams over at Orion Transfer just posted a brief introduction to managing game state. In particular, he talks about de-coupling the simulation from the renderer, and also includes a brief overview of maintaining distributed state in networked games.
I entered uDevGames ’08 because I needed motivation to get something done. The three month deadline gave me something to work to. Boston was developed by a team of three — Nathan was in charge of story and music, Micah did the comic art and character design and I took care of the 3D art, level design, and all programming.
The first task was to get a story. I rounded up Micah and had a meeting with Nathan. After about ten minutes, we had a basic story line. I went back to trying to familiarize myself with the game engine while Micah, the artist, worked on character design for ‘Boston’. The next day, after another consultation with Nathan, the writer, we had our main character drawn out.
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SoldierAnts is a turn-based strategy/action game where you pitch your wits against 1 to 4 players that can be either Human or AI. It supports two game modes, quick battle ideal for a 5 minutes burst of fun and campaign mode where you can wage a longer war to control all the territory on the map. The aim of each battle is to defeat the other team and to do this you presented with a large selection of weapons; Sniper Rifle, AK47, FlameThrower, Prod, Snowball, Grenade, RPG, Missile, Mine, Petrol Bomb, Cluster Bomb, Time Bomb and Airstrike. You may want to avoid incoming attacks or gain a better vantage point and to do this you can walk the SoldierAnts left and right, flick them to jump, use a jetpack, teleport or simply dig yourself a hole with a mole and cower. If you ever played Team 17’s classic Worms then you will have a pretty good idea what SoldierAnts is all about. It has a slick interface, intuitive control scheme, great gameplay and lasting appeal. Packing more firepower than the A-Team your band of SoldierAnts are all set to wreak havoc.
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Nebula Device is an Open Source realtime 3D game/visualization engine, written in C++. This 3D Engine runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Irix, and Xbox. It includes scripting via TCL, Python and LUA. Current progress on the Mac OS X port is not know, however the engine does seem very promising.
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It was the spring of 2008, and I hadn’t finished anything in a year. I was still easing into college, so I was very busy, but I missed game development. Even though iDevGames hadn’t run a contest in some time, I decided to create a game design to put on file just to satisfy my creative itch. I thought about games during my twenty minute walk to class one day and came up with the modular ship concept — I became very excited and drew a quick mockup:
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NUI is a C++ application framework that runs on the iPhone, Mac OS X (Universal), Win32 and Linux. Its main distinctive features is its use of 3D hardware to render the UI via OpenGL, OpenGL Es and Direct3D. Features include:
The lib is dual licensed under the GPL and commercial licensing for non-free software developers.
Brandon, the author of iCodeBlog has a three part tutorial on making a simple iPhone game up on his blog. It covers everything from graphics, to a simple AI and user interaction. For those just starting out making games for the iPhone, here’s a good way to get started. The author also mentioned that he might move on to more complicated games as well if there’s demand. See the link for the tutorials. Also, 71squared, another code blog, has an ongoing video tutorial on making an OpenGL ES based iPhone game, it’s up to three parts right now (though only two show up if you choose iPhone Game Programming as a category). So you can watch them work on the programs right in front of you.
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Panda3D is free 3D Engine that can be used for any purpose, even commercial development. Panda3D has tutorials and an active support forum. Highlights of this engine include full Python integration, performance monitoring, depth & shadow textures, installers for multiplatforms, Cg shader language, sample programs, HDR rendering and Cel Shading. The Mac OS X one-step installer includes everything you need to get started with Panda3D: the engine, the python libraries, tons of utilities, and lots of sample programs. Currently, it requires Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit.
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One sale from a gamer is good. Convincing that gamer to stick around and buy more games is, of course, better. And generating new customers from existing ones is best. In other words, in today’s challenging marketplace, “repeat business” is the holy grail. You want to attract players who love your games (and why shouldn’t they?) — and then foster a relationship with them so that making incremental sales afterwards is a breeze.
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