Indie Development Tool Showdown June 27-29 2006Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game...
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Transcript of Indie Development Tool Showdown June 27-29 2006Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game...
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Indie Game Development: Development tool showdown!
Charlie Cleveland, Founder Unknown Worlds
Matthew Wegner, CEO Flashbang Studios
Jay Moore, Evangelist Garage Games
Moderator – Eric Tams, PopCap games
4:30pm June 29th
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
What is this panel about?
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
What it’s not about
• We don’t want to evangelize a particular engine• We don’t want to get bogged down in specifics
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
What we do want to do
• Provide a good basis for evaluating engines• Talk about a few specific engines • Congratulate you on finding the nerdy panel at the
conference
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Game engines are like girlfriends
• It takes commitment to learn an engine• You could be investing in a future with this engine
for you, or people at your company• Don’t mistake a one night stand for marriage
material
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Problems with girlfriends
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Problems with girlfriends engines
• Cost• Support• Inherent value of knowledge of the engine• Is there an existing community around the engine?• Is the company that makes this engine going in the
right direction?• Can this engine meet you future game design and
business goals?
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Indie Game Development: Development tool showdown!
Charlie Cleveland, Founder Unknown Worlds
Matthew Wegner, CEO Flashbang Studios
Jay Moore, Evangelist Garage Games
Moderator – Eric Tams, PopCap games
4:30pm June 29th
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Torque
• Full 3D or streamlined 2D engine
• Network support• Includes various editors• Cross platform• Common scripting language
between versions• Big community• Active development team• Attractive price
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Popcap Framework Overview
• Freely available with full source - powers Bejewelled, Zuma, etc.
• Very basic but fully functional 2D engine.• Lots of sample code which shows you the basics of
drawing, updating, fonts, resources, sound• Somewhat inappropriately named the Sexy engine• Compiles in a minute or two under MSVC 6 or .NET• Direct 3D 7• Full software rendering, easy to check if 3D is
enabled and put in extra effects
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Pros
• Very quick to make a simple casual game• Free for commercial use, though you have to pay for 3rd party sound
support (.mp3 license applies (~$2,000), and either FMOD or Bass license required, ~$1k commercial, $130 shareware)
• Great resource and font support. Just install the font, then use their tool to generate bitmaps and definition files which your code uses.
• If you're comfortable with C++ and basic game programming, you'll have your prototype working in a day or two
• Native Flash support in engine (with license)• Great compatibility - tested on ~100 million PCs• Native support for .jpgs, gifs and .pngs with alpha channel• If you don't know Flash and do know C++, you're not likely to find a faster
or easier way to make a casual game• Virtually no learning curve for artists• Good XML parsing built-in - great for reading resources, strings whatever
you want (show example)• Easy to load/save data from the registry• Good performance tuning tools built-in
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Cons
• Monolithic "GameApp" global object and "Board" class makes data-abstraction difficult, though not a big issue for small games either
• Exists within a namespace. Hope you don't mind typing and seeing "Sexy" a lot in your code.• Almost all of the engine class data is "public" instead of "private". No excuse.• User interface "widgets" a bit clumsy. Expect some extra work if your game is UI-intensive.• PC only. Popcap has ported to OS X, but they haven't released it. Community effort is
underway for the port but expect to have to do this yourself. Search Popcap developer forums for "Mac" for link to project (esp. if you want to help).
• No networking - though CURL works great for talking with webservers for auto-update, live stats, etc. (www.curl.se)
• All drawing is done through UI "widgets", which means that you usually must create a new class for every visual effect
• No particle system or PS editing tools• Easy to internationalize for single-byte languages, but no double-byte character set support, so
if you're planning on making your game for an Asian market, expect lots of work• Very basic UI library. Expect more work to make your own dropdowns, multi-line edit controls.• - No UI layout tool• - Each UI screen and dialog will probably be its own C++ class• - You must instantiate, create and track every component in code (needlessly
complex)• - UI library not designed for custom color schemes and behavior
June 27-29 2006 Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game Developers, Publishers and Distributors
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Indie Development Tool Showdown
Summary
• What you see is what you get. Development time is quite predictable, unlike many commercial engines.
• Bundle with ActiveMark for no-brainer• Performance can be very good once you learn how the
drawing/updating model works• The code isn't great but there are no surprises either.• Popcap hopes that you'll shop your game to them first;
but don't expect a publishing deal• http://developer.popcap.com for download, forums,
developer community• Contact me at [email protected] for more
information. http://www.charliecleveland.com for slides.