Re: Game development

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

Hi Michael,

> Dear all,
>
> I'd like to develop a game and would like to follow the exact standards and
> resources used by the gnome-games developer. Can anybody put me on the
> track.

Do you want to develop a game from scratch or could you be persuaded
into being main developer on one of the existing games instead? The
problem is that gnome-games is already too big but in size and number
of games. Getting more quality into the existing games would be
preferred. The resources we have are all the platform things like GTK,
cairo, gconf, gstreamer, etc. Most of this you can read about on
library.gnome.org. Also clutter (a scene graph) will be a new
dependency and there is a lot of exciting things to do with clutter
for the games. And we have a Human Interface Guideline in GNOME too.
Other than those libs we have what we call libgames-support. It is not
a real lib but rather code shared among all the C based games.

Other than that my advice is to read the code of the existing games.
Games like glines or gnomine are not very big. You will get the idea
of how the games are build pretty quickly.

If you really really want to write your own game then my advice would
be to aim for a game type that is not covered so well current
gnome-games. We have too many single player thinking/puzzle games and
multiplayer turn based games. Perhaps a fun 2+ multiplay game of some
sort. Perhaps with collaborative gameplay to act as a team builder of
sorts. But don't get your hopes too far up. We are very restrictive
about adding new games. It must be very good quality game and mature
well tested code.

I hope I have not scared you away with all this :) If you want to
write a game then go for it. It does not have to be in gnome-games to
be great :)

- thomas