Fredrik's summer of code
During the summer of 2010 I'm going to be working on two main projects. The first is my own project, about which I'm going to write a lot, and the other is a school project from earlier this year, that I want to complete before the school starts in August.
My main project - an educational game creation tool
The ultimate goal of my main project is to create a compiler or equivalent tool, whatever that means, in order to enable teachers of elementary schools to take games into their classes as a part of the courses they are executing.
The project will continue after this summer as a part of my master degree at NTNU. This summer I will start by doing all the experimental and fun stuff that I won't have time to do as I start working on it officially (writing reports and doing all the extra work that comes with university projects).
Available game creation software
There is a lot of game creation software available out there, and in order to define my own plan for making such software, I should get to know these packages. I have limited interest in using any of them extensively, but I will be creating small, simple games, as if I was a teacher myself, to try and find out how their ideas can be built on.
Here is a list of the software that I'm going to check out:
- Blender game engine
- PyGame
- Ogre
- Panda3D
- ClanLib
- Sphere RPG Engine
- NovaShell Game Creation system
- Allegro
- Crystal Space
- Adventure Game Studio
- Unity
- Torque 3D
- GameMaker
- XNA
- IndieLib
- HGE
- Blitz3D
- FlashDevelop
- Silverlight
I have to mention that I found many of these engines and libraries through the following excellent wiki.
The first five projects are open and as "idealistic" as I'd like them to be. These tools are the ones that will receive my attention first. The next five tools are interesting from a developer friendliness point of view. The last five projects will not receive much of my attention, mainly because because they have too litle from the following important elements: 3D support, openness, usability and deployability.
The ultimate suite would be open, have tons of features, be both efficient to use and easy to learn, be deployable on a multitude of computer platforms, console platforms, mobile platforms and web browsers.
