Writing simple, real-time games for GNOME

"Chris Lord shares his experiences and six laws of writing simple games for GNOME, using Clutter.

"At GUADEC 2010, my colleagues and I did a talk, Everything you wanted to do in Clutter (but were afraid to ask)", which covered some of the things that we don't often see people doing with Clutter. My part of this presentation was focused on writing simple, real-time games. I chose Clutter as one of the primary tools to achieve this, but I hope the tips I gave would apply equally well to a game written in any library. In this article, I'll elaborate on what I presented.

"The GNOME community contains many talented application developers, and yet you see very few games. In particular, there are very few real-time games. This is probably down to a number of reasons, but one of those reasons may be that the focus of writing games is very different to the focus of writing applications.

"Writing applications, your top priorities tend to be stability, usability and maintainability. An application often goes through several developers in its lifetime, so keeping the code tidy, readable and adhering to best practices pays off immeasurably. Likewise, applications are often used for critical work, and to increase productivity, so they are of no use if they aren't stable and they aren't understandable. GNOME's focus on ease-of-use produces great applications that are often used even in corporate environments."

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