Game development with Gosu Workshop

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-27 01:56

Hi there.

Last week I gave a workshop about game development using Gosu at my university. It went pretty well, about fifty people came and the overall results were very good. It was a two-part workshop, the first part was about Gosu's basics (Window, Image, Font and events), and then we worked on an small arkanoid (conveniently called gosunoid).

You can find all the materials in the official repository. In particular, you can download the workshop materials here (there's a project for MSVC 2008 Express and Linux) and the presentation is uploaded here (although it's in spanish).

You can see a couple of photographs of the workshop too.

It maybe useful for anyone looking for ideas to make a workshop like this.

By erisdiscord Date 2011-03-27 03:43

Nice—but wow, Google Code's source browser is primitive. ;)

It's good seeing Gosu get some real-world mileage beyond Julian's own project. I just wish my Spanish vocabulary was bigger—I've got a lot of Latin roots from my AP English course in high school but I think I'm in over my head!

Question: when you say "we", did you implement this game during the span of the workshop? In what way did your audience participate in the development? I'm curious to know how something like this is done as a workshop. :)

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-28 16:35

Thanks!

About your question, There was not enough time to develop it from scratch, so I developed the game entirely, then deleted some pieces of code for the students to fill in. For instance, if you download the materials and go to the "Part 2" folder, you'll see that the game lacks a background, the blocks are gray, the scoreboard is not drawn and the board does not move. I told the students to try to code the missing parts using their knowledge.

By banister Date 2011-03-27 04:02 Edited 2011-03-27 04:10

cool! But i agree with erisdiscord here --- googlecode is so 2006, you really should move to github with all the cool kids ;)

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-28 16:36

It's getting really hard for me to move from svn to git, but I guess I have no choice... :D

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-03-27 08:38

Wow, this is awesome! I feel honored again :)

Why did you check Gosu into SVN though? Does it make things easier? How does your workflow look like, is that to centralize the 'base code' that everyone can load to their computer?

I think when Gosu's interface is cleaned up a little bit, the library will be seriously cool for educational/fun hackery, and I want to post that use case right on the front page. I am definitely going to link to this too.

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-28 16:39

I used SVN right for that. Googlecode allowed me to easily create a project, upload the code and also have a downloads section. Actually the CVS was not used too much, as I was the only developer. It was more like a free hosting :)

By the way, the students liked Gosu a lot, specially after having dealt with SDL's low level madness.

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-03-28 21:25

I meant, why did you "duplicate" Gosu's code in your repository vs. installing it in the system. Seems like it would be a pain to maintain a current Gosu within another project :) I don't mind SVN, I still use it internally for all sorts of stuff.

@vs SDL: Hah, makes me think I should add more cool (genre-neutral) high level stuff then. ;)

By TheOm3ga Date 2011-03-29 10:09

I'm not a big fan of installing system-wide libraries using Makefile, because if later I need to delete them, it's hard to track what files were installed. On the other hand, if it were packaged as a .deb file for instance, there would be no problem in having it installed.

Anyways, static linkage is faster :)

By jlnr (dev) Date 2011-03-29 11:51

oic, well that is a very good point. Of course, if anyone here wants to contribute a .deb file... :)

By RavensKrag Date 2011-03-29 17:26

You could just use checkinstall instead of the standard install command. That will make a .deb and install it for you. Haven't tried it with Gosu, but it works just fine with Chipmunk, and with various other applications.