Microsoft Introduces Popfly For Games (In Silverlight) (TechCrunch). I like Silverlight -- on a purely theoretical level, as I have yet to see anything truly impressive built with it (to be fair, I have a similar stance towards Flash, at least when it comes to multimedia applications aka games as opposed to animated banners/corporate websites/video players).

Easy-to-use game creation tools are great, and the more the merrier; but Popfly seems to be too focused on being a toybox for kids (as opposed to a proper game development environment) that I seriously doubt its capabilities.

Building things is fun; especially when it teaches you something. Why not learn some "real" programming while you're at it? I know I've been pimping it a lot lately, but it simply doesn't really get any cooler (or easier) than Ruby-based gosu. It's free (both as in beer and in speech), multi-platform (including Linux, if that matters), and teaches you a bit or two about how software and specifically games work.

Those following my Twitter stream will have noticed my recent excitement about gosu, a games development library for C++ and, more importantly, Ruby. Having only perused the sample code and (currently somewhat skimpy) documentation, I'm thinking I'm going to have boatloads of fun with it, even though I assume its capabilities possibly have some limits. Something this simple can't be that powerful -- or can it?

Limits or not, what I absolutely adore about gosu is its (very Ruby-like) simplicity. Have a look at this sort-of Hello World app:

 
require 'rubygems'
require 'gosu'
 
class GameWindow < Gosu::Window
  def initialize
    super(640, 480, false)
    self.caption = "I like cows!"
    @morn_img = Gosu::Image.new(self, "morn.png", true)
  end
 
  def update
    # update game information here
  end
 
  def draw
    # draw scene here
    @morn_img.draw(0, 0, 0)
  end
end
 
window = GameWindow.new
window.show
 

It can't really get any simpler than this -- you don't even need to set up your own game loop. Fantastic.

One of gosu's design principles is to only include the basics -- that is graphics and audio handling. It doesn't do any of the higher-level stuff -- scene management, collision detection, animations etc. -- for you. This is a good thing, since in most game projects you'd quickly end up needing something that works just a little bit different from what a possible kitchen-sink type framework would offer you.

However, after all that time spent with web development frameworks, building a game development one around gosu sounds like an interesting project to me. Something highly modular -- possibly consisting of pluggable behaviours, similar to how Torque Game Builder, another games development tool that I've been playing around with lately, works.

One of the obvious great things about gosu as opposed to Torque Game Builder is that, since you write your games in standard Ruby, it allows you to use everything that wonderful language has to offer. For example, I don't see why you couldn't write an online-enabled multiplayer game that polls JSON or XML data from a web application, or even uses ActiveResource to talk to a RESTful Rails app for some extra Ruby (and Rails) induced bliss. When I was looking at the network capabilities of Torque Game Builder, it looked like you'd have to fall back to the C++ level (and get the appropriate license allowing you to do that) in order to do advanced stuff like that.

Cool stuff.