http://github.com/jslade/chum

It’s far from complete — I’m really just working on the proof of concept now: will it be reasonably easy to use to build a full game, and will it perform decently for some relatively simple stuff out of the box?

But so far, I am pleased with how it’s coming together.  I have liked several things about using the tree of GameNodes for everything, with GameEvents to manage communications between nodes.  I recently added GameSequence, which makes use of both.  It’s intended to be the basis for managing animations and such — I already used it to implement several text animations, as shown in the AnimatedTextExample:

                // Shake side to side
                animation = new GameSequence.Series();
                int offset = FP.intToFP(30);
                to.set(center);
                from.set(center);
                to.x = center.x - offset;
                animation.addNode(textNode.animatePosition(from,to,50));
                from.set(to);
                to.x = center.x + offset;
                animation.addNode(textNode.animatePosition(from,to,70));
                from.set(to);
                to.x = center.x - offset;
                animation.addNode(textNode.animatePosition(from,to,70));
                from.set(to);
                to.x = center.x + offset;
                animation.addNode(textNode.animatePosition(from,to,70));

xI hope to be working on a couple of actual games using Chum in the near future — a 2D game called ‘Misma‘ ported from the iPhone, and a simple 3D action game along the lines of ‘3D Cube Race‘,  but with a lot more to it.  And I’ll be at Google I/O in a couple of weeks, and would be more than happy to talk about Chum, game engines, games in general, or whatever…

CowPotato was released to the Market in beta form on Aug 24, and submitted to ADC2 Aug 31.  We hope to have a non-beta release ready to go by Oct 1, and a enhanced pro version soon after that.

As part of creating CowPotato, I developed a 3D game engine that I plan to polish and reuse for more games in the future.  My eventual goal is to make that engine public (most likely as an open-source project) for others to use, but it needs the experience of a few more games before I’m ready to do that.  I will be writing future posts about game deevelopment issues here, so I hope to see you back soon.