Re: Gweled

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 8:26 PM, Steve Fox <steve thefoxhome net> wrote:
> Lately I've really enjoyed playing Gweled
> <http://sebdelestaing.free.fr/gweled/> and plan to bring it up to date
> (library-wise). I would like to get the game incorporated into the
> gnome-games bundle eventually, but would appreciate having other eyes
> review my changes in the meanwhile.
>
> Is there interest in including this game? If so, should I begin
> working working from a local repository or would I be permitted to
> import the code into GNOME SVN? I do not currently have an account,
> however I did years ago when I helped with the GNOME website
> (specifically, the Software Map).

Normally the answer for new games requests to this list is a "no" because we are overloaded with way too many languages (C, C++, Scheme, Shell, and Python) and games (16) with not enough maintainers. However, I was pulled in by the screen shots; I'm a sucker for shinny things.

So, it was a long shot but I decided to download and analyze the source.

First, let me say that this is very preliminary and the outcome ultimately depends on how much work you can put in to making this ready. The changes that I propose below will make the game better regardless of whether it is included in Gnome Games or not. Now, on to the list of things that this game has going for it:

• It is written in C which is the Gnome language of choice.
• It extensively and sanely uses GObject for data structures
• It uses GTK+ in clean and sane ways; nothing clever
  
• The code is clean
• The game itself is pretty, animated and fun to play
• The rendering engine is sufficiently abstracted as to allow easy change to it.
  

However, there are things that are working against it:

• mikmod is not a blessed dependency of Gnome and is unlikely to be approved by the release-team
• the UI will need a toolbar similar to the one in other Gnome Games games
• The game's font is a PNG array
• The game cannot scale the playing field
• No documentation
• I18n is not quite there yet
  

So, I would be willing to work with you to get this in to Gnome Games in a future release if the following list of changes are implemented or at least well on their way to a solution:

1. Replace mikmod with some blessed audio solution; ie. gstreamer for music and pulse for game events
2. All use of the custom PNG font must go to be replaced by, optionally, some flashy use of pango blitted to a pixmap or texture surface; ie. GooPixmap or ClutterTexture
3. Accomplish scaling the playing field by converting the rendering engine to use Clutter or GooCanvas (your choice). As a side effect, you get the power to make gems scale for neat rotation effects or explosions
   
4. Beginnings of gameplay documentation (easy)
   
5. Conversion of the high score table to the Gnome Games high score system (easy); might need a small configure option to turn on or off while developing outside Gnome Games
   
6. Polish up the i18n stuff (easy)

So, what do you think of this list of six items?