So! Here we are on muagames.com. A brief intro is necessary I suppose: My name is Keeyai and I’ll be your host for the evening. If you browse around the site a bit you’ll see that we are a tiny (but growing!) group of hobbyist game devs. None of us have industry experience, but why should that stop us? We share a passion for gaming and a plethora of game ideas, so now we are trying to make those games realities.
My pet project for the last… forever…, has been the MUA framework. When I first started making games it took me an eternity to get up to speed with everything. The basics really aren’t that hard, but there are so many libraries out there and so much conflicting advice that it was a huge chore just trying to decide where to begin. On top of that, as I started writing more and more games it became apparent that a LOT of the same infrastructure was being reused over and over. So, after figuring a few things out I began my framework project and that has become the cornerstone of my plan for MUA Games.
The goals of the framework are these:
- Make starting a project as easy as possible – the framework is there to abstract away all the infrastructure required before you can really begin working on your game so you can skip that and start working on your content immediately. Our approach is by no means the only (or maybe even the best) way to set up a game, but at the very least it provides an excellent starting point.
- Provide building blocks that all work together – one of the biggest headaches in game dev is integrating all the different libraries and tools. The framework is built on an event management system that seamlessly connects its many different modules. Each module represents a piece of broad functionality like 3D rendering or networking. If you want to make a 3D game, import and use the View3D module. If you want to make it networked between two computers, use the peer to peer networking module. Perhaps you want to make a multiplayer FPS like team fortress 2; you should use the ClientServer module instead. No matter what kind of game you are making, the framework should have some useful tools to help
- Extensive documentation – there are so many articles and tidbits out there, but it can be hard to put it into real context. The framework will have a long series of thorough tutorials, many demos, and multiple full games with heavy commenting for users to look at. For newbies they will be excellent places to start; for vets they can save some time or demonstrate how to achieve a certain outcome.
- Be Extendable – we want the framework to evolve as time passes and more games are made. When someone makes a nice 2D tile engine, we want to integrate it into the framework. Maybe somebody has a better way of doing some networking; the modular-ish building blocks make it so we could add their solution in and let the user choose which one to use. Hopefully we can provide a solid, reliable base, then let the community help the framework really take off.
We have many game ideas spanning multiple genres and ranging from the first MUA Framework demo Pong to a full blown space mmorpg. Our biggest challenge at the moment is team size – with just a few people we have to keep our goals realistic and keep the big games on the drawing boards for now. Hopefully as time goes by and we release a couple games, people like you (yeah, you) will get interested and decide to join or support the team. As we grow we will be able to take on bigger projects and crank out larger, higher quality games (and maybe even make some money!).
So, your job as a reader is to follow along on here as we go. Add our RSS feed to a reader, join a mailing list if we start one, maybe join the forums. We will blog about our projects as we work on them, hopefully both piquing your interest and drawing your suggestions. Feel free (read ‘obligated’) to drop in a comment with an encouraging word, some criticism, or maybe even a fart joke. We feed on your encouragement, so dish it up in large portions.
And there you have it. A decent first post – a little windy, but solid. Expect more posts in the near future — I did a bunch of work re-writing the 2D GUI system in the framework today, and Chris and I are starting a new game based on the Joust gameplay mechanic, but better. 