Game Development 01 - Introduction

published 15 Jan 2010. modified 28 Feb 2010.

I’ve been meaning to get back into quick-coding some game ideas for a while now. But one of the key stumbling blocks has been deciding which technology combination to use. Requirements are fairly simple, 3D rendering capabilities in a generally object-oriented language that is executable on most common platforms.

This article will be updated and articles covering the development of a simple game will follow providing I can overcome the decision block.

Tools and Technology Possibilities

Irrlicht

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance real-time 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.

C++, Make, Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

JMonkeyEngine

http://jmonkeyengine.com/

jME is a high performance Open Source Java-based game engine.

Java, Windows, Linux and Mac OSX

XNA

http://creators.xna.com/en-GB/

C#, Windows and xbox 360

Roll your own

OpenGL, DirectX, SDL, software renderers in a choice of languages and platforms.

http://www.libsdl.org/

Decisions, decisions

To decide which combination to use for a more complicated idea later, I’ll test them all out on a rather simple game concept that shouldn’t take too long to produce and then port. So yet another simple space invaders clone should provide enough meat to test out things like rendering, physics, user input and collision detection.

• Ease of development - integration of libraries/SDKs into my development environment.
• Ease of deployment

Next

Coming up is The Concept.