Attention Students of my RPG Class!
If you are a student from my Introduction To RPG Programming
class at http://gameprogramming.org
please click on the link in the menu above to get to the course materials for the
next lecture. Thanks.
What Is Shadetree Software?
Did you ever want to develop your own computer
games? We did, so rather than sit around and WISH we decided to
do some thing about it. First we started to look around to see
what was available as far as FREE (Limited budget you know) games
went, so we could look at them and see how they were built and
played. So off we went to the Internet to do some research, during
our research we came across 2 very EXCELLENT game development
packages while looking for games. RPGToolkit and GameMaker, with
these packages we were able to start developing our games right
away. Best of all BOTH packages had a FREE version. If you click
on the graphics below you can get furthur information on these
software packages. Shadetree Software was already involved in
software creation, so we just added a Gaming Division and Lo and
Behold - Shadetree Software Games was born.
How does the Internet
figure into game development? Typically if you have wanted to play a
particular game then you have had to go to a software store and
purchase a box which contains CD-ROM's or floppy disks. Games are
packaged this way because the data which makes up most games takes
up so much space and because physical stores have been the only
place to showcase them. This data can take the form of graphics,
sounds, character files, help, and of course the game engine itself.
Now with the gain in popularity of the Internet, gamers don't have
to get a game from a physical store, they can download the games and
updates directly to their computers. In some cases they don't
even have to install a game on their own computer. One of the
contributions of the Internet to gaming has been games which exist
entirely online. It's graphics and code exist on the web and are
expressed through a web browser. This means that updates are easier
to distribute to fans of a game who visit a central storage for the
game each time they log on to play it.
