Games with Squeak

Darius Clarke socinian at gmail.com
Fri Oct 13 15:13:25 UTC 2006


Lord,

I suspect which language you use is much less important than the tools
you use to make a professional game. The bar is very high and one
person, or even a small team, cannot make all the tools needed. Many
of those tools are purchase from 3rd parties for significant sums. At
least, that's true for the games that you mentioned. Also, quality of
game play is more important that the language it's written in, which
is a skill that takes years to learn by practice and failure and lots
of testing. For now, Smalltalk does not link to these tools very well.
Most are file based which is not so compatible with Smalltalk's image.
Managing large art content files and large quantities of them is
required which might put a strain on Smalltalk's memory management.
Professional games us a lot of tricks at the compiler level and code
architecture level to squeeze every bit of optimization at the expense
of ease of programming.

Smalltalk's strength is that it's easy to change, but that may be a
weakness here. Often in professional games, you don't want the games
easy to change by the players because the temptation to cheat is too
large.

If you have a game where it's good for the player to change the code,
then you may have an advantage with Smalltalk over other games.

If you have a good game design or subject environment niche, Smalltalk
might help you make an interesting game one can sell. It allows you to
make many design mistakes and correct them quickly. But your niche
will be more important than your platform or how professional it is.

That said, Croquet can use Direct X. Maybe you could test out your
game design in SecondLife and, when it starts to be popular, migrate
it to Croquet.

You might want to check out the Gamasutra game developer site for
pointers how to get started for the Independent Game Developer.

Cheers,
Darius



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