Community Game

Oh, and it would be great if you add description of some cool tower-defence games your ever played before. Add screenshots, descriptions, youtube links etc in "Tower Defence analogs" folder.

We planing the skype discussion at the end of the week.
It could be at friday night (for USA timezone) and saturday morning for Russia, Moscow.
Or
sunday morning (USA), sunday evening (Russia, Moscow)

If someone want to participate in our conversation, please go to THIS page and add your contact info.

it would be great if you prepare 1-3 game ideas before meeting. At the meeting every person in turn will briefly describe his ideas and his vision on that. And we will discuss and choose together one of the most impressive and appropriate idea afterwords.

I don't have a skype but I want in. Should we sell the game or post it online. Also if we sell it would we split the money evenly? What about distribution if we sell the game?

What about the engine, graphics, and code?

Am I too late to the party, or can I sign up as a contributor too?

This post may end up sounding like a job application, but I'd like to let you know what I think I could bring to the table!

A little background about myself:

I'm an embedded software engineer by trade (mostly C. but bits of cpp here and there) with 5 years of experience in defence, networking, monitoring & control etc. in multithreaded real-time environments. I have a masters in Computer Engineering and have been coding for the best part of 15 years.

I live in the UK and thanks to my job, I'm pretty experienced with working over multiple time zones.

I've been following GCC since the first edition and have been quietly observing the forums for a while! I would consider myself to be proficient in C++ and have a pretty solid grasp of graphics programming.

Over the last year or so, on and off, I've been extending the GCC engine to include various effects and so on; reflective and refractive water, terrain, skeletal animation, some rudimentary shadow mapping among many other things, just for the fun of it.

This community game is a fantastic idea, and it gives people like myself the opportunity to work towards something, rather than aimlessly adding bits and bobs here or there.

I'll add my details to the google docs posted above!

Originally posted by peanutsandwich
Am I too late to the party, or can I sign up as a contributor too?

As we haven't done much yet I don't see why you couldn't jump in. Any others that want to join should check on the links at the bottom of page 2 of this thread.

Hello, peanutsandwich!

It's great to see experienced programer in the team ))

Originally posted by cometlove1
Should we sell the game or post it online.

I agree with Rez and mholley519 - we should release game for free. But there is a big question about code license and it especially depends on licenses of libraries we consoder to use.

But I think I would be great if we could create game, which we could puplish on SteamGreenlight as a free game, for example.

I think talking about selling and how the game would be distributed is premature. Lets actually get some code written first.

I have added the column "GCC User name" to the google docs "the team". This helps us identify people between docs.

@cometlove1: Skype is a free service when calling from pc to pc. This will be an important part to making decisions as a team. Also knowing peoples rough location is important for the phone calls. There is about 11 hour time difference between some team members.


@peanutsandwich nice to see another network guru

Also maybe the google docs should not be so public? Maybe only people who have shown there intentions on the forum should be permitted to view. I know some people are not always comfortable sharing there details publicly on the internet. Would like to know what others think?

I changed access level of our GoogleDocs project. If you want to view or edit this, please write me your email.

One of the most important things to choose in my opinion is what engine to use.

IMO viable options are:

• Unity
  Being unity programmer myself I got plenty of experience using it. However I must warn you that ease of use hide some nasty drawbacks like using engine as a black box. Unity is buggy, has certain architecture (which is not compatible with GCC engine design), has some strange features not having vital ones. It is trying to be jack-of-all-trades engine being master of none sad to say. Anyway, it has somewhat good extensible editor and ability to import most of the common file formats. Imo resource management in unity is fubar. Rendering is pretty good although there are many caveats in shader programming. Unity is also capable of doing "multiplatform" (but don't expect it to work after you change the platform). It has modern animation system, built-in Physx but lacks normal GUI system (current one is no go and new system is in development for more than a year already and still not ready). There is Scaleform plugin from Autodesk which costs $300 though.
  All in all, it Unity may give itial boost but don't expect breeze ride, as the project will grow large tons of problems will arise and ease of use will be outnumbered by inflexibility and lack of [useful] features.
  
• Roll own engine
  Maybe be a good idea to build simple engine from the scratch for the simple game, however I suppose most of you know that even simple engine requires HUGE amount of time to develop. (This is what I chose for myself, although I'll build only part of the engine as whole engine is incomprehensible.) At this point you may think why not to just use GCC engine and be done with it? Despite that I like the book the source code is too much inclined for the education purposes and not for the actual development. Also there are many chunks of outdated and even unused code.
  All in all, this maybe a viable solution, but don't expect any robust solution soon, it's damn freaking hard.
  
• Some other engine, maybe UDK
  I don't really have any other experience with engines. From time to time I want to dig in into UDK however this engine is hard and big. Job offers which use UDK are almost non existent in my area that's why I don't know yet whether it's good option to learn it. (Bear in mind that current UDK is based on Unreal3 engine and there is Unreal4 engine announced already, which may result in fade of Unreal3 engine development and thus current version of UDK, but no one knows when we should expect it and when UDK based on Unreal4 will arrive.)
  If you have worked with other engines you think are good, share your thoughts.
  

My personal opinion is: why not use GCC?

As mentioned several times in the book, it's not a production level engine, but we're not exactly aiming for a triple A game here.

The engine is perfectly fit for purpose IMO, and we can always extend it to add functionality that we feel is lacking.

Provided the game turns out to be what we're hoping for, it might even give Mike and Rez something to refer to in the book if there are any more editions in the works. Even if it ends up being 'See what these guys did with the GCC engine? Yeah, don't do that!'

I have no objection to using any other engine, and i certainly think we could get things done quicker using something like Unity, I'm just stating my thoughts on the matter.

I like the idea of using the GCC engine and making it more robust. However this will greatly increase the overall development time.

Is there anyone able to do the art work for this project? 2d or 3d? I am concerned we have a good programming team but no way to create the graphics.

Is there anyone able to do the art work for this project? 2d or 3d?

I think this is not a big deal. If no one of us be able (and passionate enough for doing art), we can find an artist from outside. Let's we hold a skype meeting at first to discuss a main problems and after that we could start searching of artist.

I have added a preferred contact time to the Team doc. Hopefully there will be a good time for us all to discuss topics on skype.

The meeting topic is currently being used for that. We're filling it out to see how much overlap we have.

Yesterday 23.06.2013 was the first skype meeting about community game. We discussed key points, tools, goals and rough estimate of project.

Resume:

Initial team size: 6 persons

Game idea: Tower Defence game, with biological setting (viruses, cells, bacteria)
Tools

• Unity
  
• Blender
  
• Perforce
  
• Assembla
  
• C# as a scripting language

Rude estimate: 6-9 month

Project tend to be open source and as free as possible.

Hi Mike and Rez!

The folks working on the community game have settled on using the GCC engine as the foundation for the game engine and aim to expand and improve on what is already there to eventually make a tower defense game.

With that being the case, our first question is: do either of you have any objection to this?

If you are happy with us as a team doing this, would you have any objection to us taking the GCC engine into a separate (public) repo wholesale in its current form and then making our modifications on top of this? Or do you guys have another idea that you'd be happier with?

We obviously don't want to step on toes with this!

If you'd prefer to discuss this through PMs, please let me know and I'll happily carry on the discussion with you guys there!

Thanks!

Mark