The path we are on
Previously, I have talked about my plans for Leadwerks and how to get there. In that blog I started with technical specs and went backwards with the path we would follow to achieve those goals. Now I have begun to put some of these ideas into practice and I want to review my plan with you.
I met with a very large academic institution a few months ago and talked about using Leadwerks to teach game programming. This is the whole reason I wrote this blog and did the research included therein. When I put the graph up showing job requirements, it was a very easy sale.
I then gave a short talk to a group of their students who had some web development background, but had zero game development experience. Perfect! These people are my bread and butter. The purpose of this was to gauge interest in a class in game development, and they were very interested.
As I was talking to these people I realized I could not meet their expectations. No one else could either, but I knew at the end of a two week course they would only have very rudimentary ugly games made, not the dreams they had in their head. These people did not know anything about mipmaps, debuggers, texture coordinates, and they did not care. They just wanted to make games.
I cancelled my plans to hold a class because I knew we weren't ready to give them what they really needed. Leadwerks is the easiest way to build your own 3D games, but we are not all the way there yet. No one out there is really giving complete beginners the means to learn to make their games quickly, but we can be the first to do it with a bit more work.
As I stated previously, the documentation is being revised, including an offline copy of the docs. This takes an enormous amount of time because I have to copy, paste, and edit hundreds of pages. I am also revising all the code examples to only use the main .lua and .cpp files and get rid of the App::Start() stuff, which is a holdover from mobile.
The next step is to create a broader selection of high quality game templates. This is the final step that is needed to bridge the gap between game development technology and a complete beginner. The templates have to be polished and feel like a game you would actually want to play. This must happen or everything I have done has been a waste of time.
We are in a race against time to connect with a large audience in a way where they can't imagine life without Leadwerks. If I fail to do that, we will go the way of every other abandoned open-source game engine out there.
So that is what I am working on.
- 7
14 Comments
Recommended Comments