Game dev notes

l33t pool

My first game for facebook.

I’ve been working on this game for the last 3 month as my first project on Unity3d. It is called l33t pool and it’s a facebook game. It was designed for p2p multiplayer. It uses system where you represent client and server at the same time and try to connect to other people on the net.
It is completely free and I encourage you to check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/leet_pool/
Tell me what you think. Thanks!

Popular game engines

I use Unity3d as my main game engine for my current project. I tried to instantiate many blocks(Object.Instantiate()) and Unity does that relatively slow. So I wanted to try out another engine with better performance.

During the week I rebooted to linux and made myself familiar with Ogre. It’s a crossplatform rendering engine developed on c++. And it can do almost everything that Unity can do if you take your time and develop all tools for your game from the ground up. Of course you can export meshes from Blender and there is one cool tool to fill your scenes - ogitor. But you can only depend on your coding skills when you use ogre because any available tool is supported usually by one person(basically community effort). The main plus of Ogre is its support of modern graphics features(directx 10). Using Ogre you’re more likely to produce good looking game. And it is a very fast rendering engine.

So I researched a little bit further. What rendering engine is fast and has good supported tools ? Irrlicht seems to the answer. It’s programmed in c++. It’s more straightforward than Ogre. It has tools backed by Ambiera company:

Providing powerful software development tools and libraries such as irrKlang, irrFuscator, irrEdit and irrXML, some of them are free or even open source, to simplify the development of multimedia and game software.

I did not try to make a big scene with many objects in Irrlicht yet. So I cannot compare it’s performance for my task.

I also noticed another engine - Panda3D. It’s based on python so it’s easy to pick up. There is interesting performance comparison which suggests that Panda3D is more capable engine in OpenGL than irrlicht:) I did not take it seriously though. Panda also features supported scene editor. I think it’s a very good game engine.

So choose game/rendering engine carefully depending on the game that you want to develop. You might want some graphics features which are supported only by Ogre. Or you might want better tools like those in Irrlicht. Or maybe easy dynamic language like in Panda3D. Use Unity3D if you think that every feature it provides is essential for you. if you want to know how scene manager and geometry batching work you should try more lower level engines like ogre.

Interesting gamedev podcasts

I recently started listening to podcasts whenever I have free time. Wanted to share with everyone links to those podcasts that I especially like.

• Infinite Ammo Alec Holowka, host of the show, knows a good deal about game development. This podcast is very open and provides good insight on indie game development. I liked episodes with derek yu(spelunky), chevy ray(framework flashpunk), matt thorson(untitled story, jumper).
• Gamedevradio Episode #10 provides very good marketing and pr tips for starting indie developer.
• Tigradio Very funny show. Episode with Edmund Mcmillen(super meat boy) is must listen to know more about this successful indie developer.
• Indie games Interesting and thought out questions. They actually prepare them for their guests:) Episode with Chevy Ray turned out to be very funny and educating at the same time.
• Brainy Gamer This show is more about gamer’s perception of games. Although some episodes give very good insight on game design. For example this episode with Jonathan Blow(creator of very well received indie game Braid).