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.

The Spawn is alive!

So I finally got a blog up and running. The actual files aren’t up here yet but on their way. What I did get to do is a short text about The Project. I’ll write more about the educational side of the project as well as tutorials, modules and maybe even one or more videos.

This weekend is the Global Game Jam and we are jamming here so hopefully I’ll get something done using the engine. If so, it will be blogged about. My friends over at Media Design School in New Zealand will blog about their Jam here. Looking forward too what their teams create!

And of course I can’t reveal this years GGJ theme yet, but its awesome! And it’s very possible to use the engine for that theme.