open game dev projects

Question

Hi All,

I'd like to get into open game development projects to get some experience and improve my programming skills. I appreciate if you can point me to the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you are very serious about game development there are a few open source game engines/graphics APIs know of:

OGRE 3D

CrystalSpace3D

I'm sure there plenty more. You could also look into games that are being built on these engines.

Answer 2

A few points of advice:

• Avoid 3D games to begin with; get a rock-solid 2D engine happening first. The third dimension just complicates things without adding anything new---the maths can be a bit trickier to get your head around, and you'll need more complicated assets (3D meshes rather than pixels).

• Start with something like Haaf's Game Engine (http://hge.relishgames.com/), and build a framework up from there. You'll need to do the basics yourself, such as writing an entity system.

• Don't be too ambitious with your first game. Just try to clone an existing 2D game, such as Pac Man, Tetris, Space Invaders, Asteroids or whatever. Get it working on top of your engine, then write a second game, and aim to abstract out the underlying engine into something you can reuse and build upon.

• Keep your motivation up by taking part in the various game programming competitions; even if you can't complete a game within the constraints of the competition, getting involved in the community is a massive boon.

Answer 3

I'm a member of OpenTyrian, and we currently only have two member, so yeah, we could use someone. There's C (bug fixes) and C++ (bug fixes and new features) code so you can get involved with whatever you want.

Be advised that the code is a port from a DOS game thought, and thus, the code is VERY ugly, and has horrible design, (given enough time, I'd hope to change this) not the best thing if you want to learn the proper way of doing stuff.