Not just a project about a game engine

This is not just a project about a game engine. It is a project about a open source game engine in Flash and teaching my students more about game programming. But there is more. Since it’s an open source project I hope that the project will teach me and my students more about running and participating in open source projects. I’ve read several articles from professionals where they point out how usefull it is when sitting in a job interview if you have been part of some open source project. I hope to set my students on a road that will help them be successfull. It makes you stick out. It shows that you have a passion for programming and the technologies you are an expert in. Another blog post about hiring programmers, put it well:

“It means they’re scratching an itch, like they ran into something that they thought should be improved, or ran into a bug and they fixed it themselves. That level of participation is a good discriminator.”

I’ve read good advice on open source projects before, like Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0 by Damien Katz. Well worth reading. Today I read another good one. This blog post about Top ten reasons why I won’t use your open source project. I see good advice there that I hope we can put to use! Any other such good articles you can suggest? All help is appreciated.

So this is not just a project about a game engine. It’s also about helping students learn more than just programming.

Release of the Spawn Engine version 0.1

This is it! Finally had time to fix a Sourceforge account, add the engine as a project, upload the file so I can release the Spawn Engine version 0.1.

Download the Spawn Engine v 0.1 and get started. If you have any trouble please comment.

I apologize for all the comments in swedish in the code. Remember that this is a project where we work with this engine as a text-book for a swedish programming course. That is also why this version is fully playable yet has a lot of room for improvement. That is what my students are working with at the moment; building add-ons and tutorials that will appear in the blog in the future.

Tune in later on for version 0.2 with lots of small updates. If you wish to help out with this project or use it as a teacher please contact me by commenting.

First Global Game Jam at NTI

We had a great time last weekend at NTI Gymnasiet in Göteborg together with three strong second year students working in a team. Me and my 10 year old son was a team too and I’ll share more about our game later. The students worked hard and did a good job considering the fact that they have had just one semester of programming training. We had no third years unfortunately since they are away from school on trainging out at different companies.

The student team had one programmer, one artist and one designer. Their experience is that in the future they simply need to be better. They came across a lot of problems that were hard to solve at their current skill level and even if they learnt a lot they still feel they have a lot more to learn. Which is good!

Our friends at Media Design School did a great job and have blogged about their experience in their blog. Look at that sweet game Dead Pixels their students and Grinding Gear Games did.

We look forward to next year when we will have even more students and teachers involved doing great games! This was after all the first time and we are proud to have been part of something amazing like GGJ. And we were the only swedish high school / upper secondary school that had a GGJ site. Respect 🙂