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


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What is this panel about?


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What it’s not about

• We don’t want to evangelize a particular engine• We don’t want to get bogged down in specifics


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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


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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


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Problems with girlfriends


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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?


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.

Indie Development Tool Showdown June 27-29 2006Casuality Seattle: A Conference for Casual Game...

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