Social Games Distributing Games with Gluon and Open Collaboration Services Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen Dept. of Computer Science Aalborg University Selma Lagerlöfs Vej 300 9220 Aalborg Øst Denmark [email protected] ABSTRACT indie games have been getting a lot of press - even so far as The Gluon game creation framework is designed to make the to getting their own, dedicated section on Microsoft's game creation of games simpler. But it is also about making the console, called XBox Live Indie. distribution of those games simpler, and enabling those who play the games to report back on the quality and any other Many of the indie game creators do not, as a direct result things they may have to say on the topic. As such, this paper of being very small teams, have enough resources to build describes how the Gluon software packages uses the Open an engine for their games. As such, they often look else- Collaboration Services framework to allow for this multi-way where for help with this part of the development. The ris- communication: From creator to player, from player back to ing star on the game engine sky is Unity3, who by Game creator, and from player to player. Developer Magazine were named one of the top 5 gaming companies[Nutt 2009] of 2009. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.5 [On-line Information Services]: Data sharing Now, this is the state of the art of game creation. However, it falls short in one very important aspect: The distribution chain for Unity and its ilk (which counts engines such as the General Terms Unreal Engine 3 Dev Kit and the Source Engine) stops on Distribution of Gluon-based computer games using Open the desktop of the game creator. It is our intention in this Collaboration Services paper to show how the Open Collaboration Services4 com- bined with the Gluon game engine5 can provide the game Keywords creation community with a new and alternative way of cre- open collaboration services, gluon, games ating and distributing games. 1. INTRODUCTION 2. PREVIOUS WORK While video game development has become a very large busi- Distributing games is traditionally done either via classic ness over the last few years, there is still a grass roots move- media such as CDs or DVDs, and more recently through ment, known as indie games. This is a wide community of digital distribution systems such as Steam Powered6, Im- small game makers, which operate in a much more direct pulse Driven7 and the new player on that particular field, and communicative manner. An example of this is Wolfire ModDB's Desura8. These are all at the opposite end of the Games1, the creators of the widely acclaimed (and recently distribution chain to the game engines described above. open sourced) rabbit fighting game Lugaru HD2. However, in none of these engines exist any integration with Indie games are often somewhat quirky and experimental, the distribution systems, analogue or digital, and as such, and target a much smaller audience than the AAA games the barrier is somewhat higher than it really needs to be. A that tend to get most of the press. However, lately the game creator either needs to know how to build websites (to provide their own download site for the game) or manually 1 http://www.wolfire.com/ upload the game to one of the distribution services. 2http://www.wolfire.com/lugaru/ In KDE 3, a service was introduced by the name of GetHot- NewStuff. This service originally started as a way of fetch- ing things from a website; basically a simple, one-way dis- 3http://www.unity3d.com/ 4http://socialdesktop.org/ocs/ 5http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/ 6http://www.steampowered.com/ 7http://www.impulsedriven.com/ 8http://www.moddb.com/groups/desura/ Figure 2: Infographic showing the flow of Gluon games from idea to player and back Figure 1: The Players and Makers of Games only client or the Gluon Player Plasmoid), Maemo, MeeGo tribution system for various content. In KDE 4 this was and so on. greatly expanded upon, and it was eventually ratified by Freedesktop.org under the name Open Collaboration Ser- 4.1 Creation and Distributing vices[Karlitschek et al. 2010], currently at version 1.5, with Creating games in Gluon Creator is a matter of dragging the next version being worked on. items into place. The GameObject/Component system shall not be explained in depth here, as it is not relevant to the One of the important aspects of the Gluon game engine is distribution system, but this is what allows the game cre- that there are no compiled binaries that must be shipped ators to create games in this manner. Drag items into place with a game. Rather, the games are collections of assets, in the scene, add functionality to the items, and set values such as graphics (png, tga...), sounds (wav, ogg/vorbis...), on these through the Properties dock. Much more informa- brains for the SMARTS AI system, and game logic is created tion about this part of the process can be found in the Gluon as scripts using the powerful scripting system QtScript. This documentation9. allows the same game to be shipped on any platform that the Gluon engine runs on, without any changes from the Distribution of the games, once created, is the simple matter game authors' point of view. of using the Distribution dialogue in Gluon Creator, a design for which is pictured in Figure3. As the mockup shows, this 3. TERMINOLOGY dialogue not only allows for the uploading of new content to Before continuing, some terminology needs to be defined. In the distribution website, which is GamingFreedom.org by the paper, two important terms are used to describe groups default. It also allows for interaction with the players of of Gluon users: The Players of Games and the Makers of games, in that a list of new items are shown, both messages Games. As the names indicate, a Player of Games would and player-provided screenshots, and the maker of the game be a person who uses Gluon as a way of entertaining them- is thus able to comment on the game as well, and thus in- selves by playing games (and, we hope to prove, interact teract directly with the players of their game. with others with the same interest). However, a Maker of Games is not necessarily uninterested in playing games. As Importantly, while only one person can be the owner of a such, an Euler diagram of these (see Figure1) would show a game, multiple people can be contributors. What this means very large overlap between the two, with a large number of is that the messages they post about the game are marked Players of Games being only that, but with only few Makers as author supplied. The owner furthermore has granular of Games not also being Players of Games. control of what the various contributors are allowed to do. The list of permissions is as follows: This fact is important to remember through the rest of the paper - when the term Maker of Games is used, it thus is Upload (default: allowed) This will allow the contributor implicit that it also means Player of Games. The few Makers to upload new versions of the game. To encourage of Games who do not also take part in the playing of those the inclusive development model, all contributors are games (or at least the discussion thereof) are specifically not allowed by default to upload new versions of a game. a part of the target audience. If they are covered anyway, This, of course, may not be the optimal solution for this is of course a pleasant happenstance, and while no effort larger projects with many contributors, and as such will be put into discouraging the behavior, no effort will this option can be disabled on a per-contributor basis. be put into supporting the behavioral pattern of such users either. Moderate (default: allowed) The contributor will, when allowed to moderate, be able to edit comments made by non-contributors for the specific game. Editing a 4. THE GLUON DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM message will cause it to be marked, and the moder- Enter the Gluon distribution system: An end-to-end solu- ator's name will be listed alongside the edit, with an tion for creating, distributing games, and receiving feedback optional reason for the moderation. on them. Figure2 describes this flow; the game creators use the Gluon Creator application to create the games, which Heavy Moderate (default: not allowed) The contributor then are uploaded to the OCS based Gluon distribution web- will with this option enabled be allowed to delete com- site, and finally downloaded by the players of games using a ments made by non-contributors for the game. Gluon Player on any one of the many supported platforms: Windows, MacOS X, Linux/X11 (either the stand alone Qt- 9http://gluon.gamingfreedom.org/node/10 that Qt's labels support (in stead of reinventing the wheel). Initial Screenshots A list of screenshots provided by the makers of the game, so the screenshots list can be pop- ulated immediately upon game release, so the makers of games do not have to wait until users have provided screenshots. As the internet saying goes: "Pics, or it didn't happen". Initial Tags Tags which the makers of the game believe apply to this game. This is not a canonical set of tags, as any user is able to apply their own tags10. A notable absence here is the achievements which are so popular with so many players of games (witness the many people who are hunting achievements on the various other more closed game platforms such as XBox 360, Steam and the like).