Monday 12 August 2013

Open Source Engine, Open Source Fighting Game

Open Source

About two weeks ago, the new hybrid engine which runs the application logic in JavaScript, and forks any performance sensitive/incompatible functions over to native was open sourced (get access here).
This month we'll be getting up documentation on the underlying APIs and figuring out a release strategy for updating the code base, but feel free to have a dig through the codebase. The idea of providing the source code is to allow you to self publish your created games as your own apps on the relevant mobile app stores without the need to launch your game through our Multi app game launcher.

I did a few talks this past month at SIGGRAPH and various meetups, demoing the platform and giving an overview idea on how it works. The guys at Intel were kind enough to send me a video recording of one of the talks which you can check out by clicking the link above.

World of Fighters

We've also just released a little tech demo multiplayer 3d fighting game showing the combined usage of the UI, Maps and Character Editor in action. I'll be documenting how it was done over the next week or so. But in the meantime, you can download the game package file containing all the assets and source code for the game, and use the new import pipeline to make a full clone of the game. See a walkthrough of this process by clicking the link above. But, note that the import process currently takes a few minutes to complete.

What's Next?
The plan for this month is to refresh the website, provide documentation, work on a mobile friendly editor (the tech works for mobiles, but the UI will need to be adjusted to suit).

We're going to be working prominently out of the Barbican Center in London this month, so if you're around drop me a message and I'll happily go through game dev tutorials/advice/support with you.
At the end of the month we'll be going up to Edinburgh to demo the tech at Turing 2013 as part of the Edinburgh fringe festival, so if you're around feel free to drop by.

Funding
Recently we joined up with the Mozilla WebFWD accelerator programme who will be helping us turn this project into a sustainable business by helping us exploring various business models, introducing us to their network and pairing us up with some amazing mentors. It's only been two weeks but, I have to say that so far it's been absolutely amazing. We've been lucky enough to be teamed up with Ali Aydar who has been giving us some invaluable lectures and advice on business strategy. So expect some blogging on those topics soon, as the advice we're getting is so damn useful!

We've had a lot of interest from representatives of EA, Activision and Indie game studios for packaging the platform as an add on to an existing game engine such as Unity. For this use case we'd be able to augment the real-time updates across mobile platforms for your own game engine, allowing you to use it for pain points such as adjusting the UI of a game without having to redeploy it on each device, and allowing you to in real-time A/B test the monitization rates of virtual items. If any this sounds like something you'd like to see, please let me know to help push this use case up the schedule.

We'll also be exploring a crowd funding campaign for creating more game templates such as a side scrolling platformer, real-time strategy game, first person shooter, car racer and flight/space simulator. If you have any suggestions on things you'd like to see for that, please let me know.

Ok, enough for now. But seriously! Thanks for your time guys :)
Ash

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