MechaSource - Beta SDK Discussion, Develop, share and play games

this

isn't mechasource mostly scripting

as in, you could write your game in notepad?

Ofcourse your game files are local. Everything else would be a bit tedious to work with.

The site only shows a promotion of it as of yet. Hopefully it'll be out soon
The homepage is changing to a java applet soon, too

technically, yeah.

This post has been edited by MechaBowser on May 27 2009, 12:14 AM

Retropersective time!.

MechaSource is not far from celebrating a 1 year anniversary here on MFGG, and it's been a long time. It wouldn't be fair of me if I said I have been working on the same thing all the time - MechaSource has changed in many ways. Let's have a look!

The first design of MechaSource was purple with glass effects. For those of you who don't remember this at all, let's refresh your memory


The icons on the middle were draggable and resizeable. As much as this sounds fun, it felt very unprofessional. I had a spree of these going, but none of them felt right. The entire place felt empty since there could have been a million of buttons but instead the icons that could move freely. And as much as freely sounds good, it felt chaotic. This was definitely one of my high priorities for change.

The next was the side bar (seen on the left). It is an easy way to navigate, but it's definitely placed the wrong spot. It feels awkward to read sideways every time you have to change section.
I looked at what other people had done for navigation bars, and my new inspiration came from Microsoft's task bar, which is by default located at the bottom. I tried dragging it to the left, and it felt confusing. It was around this time I got aware of the need to have it at the bottom.

The purple. I am not sure why I chose purple in the first place. Because it fits the logo? Maybe. Because its a warm colour? Maybe. But what I was sure of is this: it didn't fit. My inspiration came when I posted yet another "did I overdo it?" topic in the CCC about a few changes I had done to the logo. Some members pointed out that it was very obvious that the purple didn't really contrast with the red logo, and maybe doing something about that could help. I tried blue (contrast to red) and it instantly looked smooth.

Enough talking, let's see what I've ended up with.


The MechaSource Network Games section. (Keep in mind parts have been filtered, blurred or cropped out in order to avoid spoilers. Everything could be due to change.)

Let's see
The navigation bar is on the bottom
the player status and icon is on the left. It feels much more natural to the human eye as you read from left to right
blue / red contrast
no distracting background detail

of course if you don't enjoy my skin as much as you do, you are free to create your own skin.

One of the things the previous MechaSource versions lacked was communication between game and network. It didn't feel like the games were a part of the network as such, and by that not a part of the user. Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to connect player / game, player / player and game / game. It's really tough and requires a lot of thinking. When I need inspiration, I use to look at other games and ask "what could this game have done to integrate more into my life?" and ideas pop up like crazy. While I will not share my ideas with you until they are finalized, I will share with you something that is now possible, but wasn't from the start (and never intended!).


Meet the achievements

You might be thinking "baww Mecha achievements aren't new".
In the beginning, there weren't achievements outside of each game. Every developer had to hard-code his achievements with the saving system. This process has been made much easier (not to be confused with made for you), and I came up with a solution that connected MechaSource Network and MechaSource game objects.

Why are achievements needed? Achievements are a great tool to keep a player not only interested in the game, but interested in what others think about him in the game. Achievements are like medals, and it's lovely to gain new medals and flash them to everyone. This improves the player/player experience.

What is the player tab? The player tab is statistics. While I will not show them to you now, you will probably see them later. Statistics are info the game can collect about the player and show to not only him, but everyone else. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds, and I'll cover it later. Enjoy.

Lovely!


Though maybe add some more translucency, Aero-style?

Also, the font, albeit quite nicely contrasting, could use to be a bit more stylish.

This post has been edited by Tri on May 27 2009, 01:41 PM

Surely there'll be a more organized way of finding a game once this is released? Sure, the way you have it now is nice, but once you start getting a larger library, you're going to need to sort them up, perhaps by genre, author, fangame/indie?

Definitely. At the moment, they are sorted by how often you play them. The ones you've played recently are at the top. I think that's a good solution. Although I do see where you're coming from, and I appreciate the feedback.

I swear to god if I don't try this within a month. I will overload from sitting around at my desk for 5 hours straight bored with nothing to do but help test stuff.

anyways lookin sleek. Loving it I am.

Quick question will you have to periodically dowload new versions or auto update?

Every game is automatically kept up to date. So is MechaSource itself.

This may or may not have been asked before, but:
Will it be possible to download MechaSource games, and play them while offline?

Yes, it will. But you will be lacking a load of possibly crucial features doing so that I wouldn't recommend it. Of course there are games like Super Mario Coz that works perfectly fine offline, but some games might pull a few strings of information off the database, and those won't like you when in offline mode. Definitely is possible though, and you will be sure your data is saved just as online.

Cool. Also do you know any ideas how to get your site working? It won't work, it says vitalize has crashed or something. and if I use firefox or normal IE, it just crashes

Hopefully it'll be fully functional the upcoming days.

Yeah, don't mean to be hatin' but the applet is a bit dysfunctional and impractical (for some); maybe switch to something more convenient and easily accessible?

The Vitalize applet is only temporary. It was originally a java applet, but some people need to look at it first before I put it back up.

Even better - make two versions!

One Vitalize, one whatever else. I like the current Vitalize one.

Would that explain Firefox not being able to install the plug-in it needs?

yes

So thats why I couldn't view the site. Hopfully, a FF working version comes out soon.

wait wat

You mean if I have a game in the online library or what ever and I change it just a little and accidentally have a huge glitch it will automaticly replace my working version with my new messed up version? :x