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Neha: I feel like my childhood was filled with computer games, particularly educational ones. Very fond of the Learning Company. [Video gaming music plays] There was this game called Gizmos and Gadgets that you could play, and you're kind of going through these levels and collecting different parts to put together like a bike or an airplane. I really, really loved that game. I played it many times. It may or may not have inspired me to become a mechanical engineer, which is what I have my degree in.
Let the games begin
Martin: One of the things I worry about with kids today is, you know, games for us, they weren't that impressive and they were things that a person could do and then make some money from. And now you see these games by these triple-A studios that are amazing and have more budget spent on them than major Hollywood movies. You know, and then and then they're coming into coding and they realize how much work that is actually to do.
Neha: Yeah, I think what's fascinating about that is that, just like with open source, right? Like the concept of computer games and video games has been around for a while now. And so we have this breadth of knowledge to have the ability to texturize and shadow and move. And these are all these libraries that are built now. We don't have to go through the same beginning pieces of, like, building a video game. We have that now, right? And we could build on that foundation just like we can with open source and software in general. So I feel like it's so exciting. It shows us how far we've come.
Neha: Well, if you couldn't tell, the theme for this show today it is gaming. And so for starters, we're going to be hearing from Johanna Pirker, a game engineer and professor working to create more equitable spaces online. We're also going to have some tips on functional programming resources to check out and a feature interview all about how open source is democratizing the building of games. And first, of course, we have First Commit and I'm really excited about this one.
Neha: One thing that's great about open source is just how much it levels the playing field for people who want to become developers. But there are still lots of inequities in the programming world and in the gaming world as well. Today's guest is on a quest to make sure that games and other parts of the online world are more accessible and equitable.
Martin: Before we sort of dove into your career today, I wanted to hear a bit more about how you got started. You mean we used someone that was always interested in video games at a young age? Or did you get into computer programming early? How did you get started?
Martin: Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I think it was Roger Ebert or somebody said that cinema was a machine for creating empathy, but I think for virtual interactive experiences and, you know, games, if you want to call them that, what these virtual interactive experiences, again, can give you a whole different level of empathy.
On the one hand, many people are sort of left behind because some people just don't see this potential in games. Again, have a little bit of a negative bias, thanks to news and media and so on, so forth, which only talk about violence and addiction. And secondly, many of those games are also particularly designed for people who have experience with games. But I think like, especially experiences like these, could be for everyone, right? I would love to see a young girl walking with their grandparents in their virtual museum. People who are often like left behind in our society in general I see so much potential here for social connections and integration into our society as a whole.
Neha: You know, I've always been like a big believer in games, but when you put it like that, you know, you're really opening my mind up to like all the possibilities. And I can picture how different it is when you get to share an experience side by side that you may not have, like, access to otherwise, you know? So I'm curious about, like, kind of the opposite right now. What are some of the biggest challenges to inclusivity, diversity and accessibility in the gaming world that you think need to be solved?
Martin: Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, that just stresses the importance of why we need diversity in these fields, because without having those diverse viewpoints and, you know, the risks that people have got from coming from different backgrounds, it's hard to build in (from the beginning) the safeguards that are needed to make it a welcoming space for everybody. I was talking to the R&D lead at ILM [Industrial Light & Magic]. She built StageCraft, the thing for how they made The Mandalorian. Absolutely, like, a legend. Complete genius. And she was saying as well that early in her career, nobody really connected for her that she could be artistic and mathematic at the same time by doing things like this. So if a young, you know, Johanna was to come up to you now and ask your advice, what would your advice be?
Martin: So many programmers who are gamers or who got into developing because they like video games. But lots of these folks, they might not really think about open source or or different parts of video games that need good developers. So Klint, to start, what are the different parts of video games that developers are working on?
Klint: I mean, there's so many pieces to a video game, which I think is why a lot of developers don't necessarily think that they can get started making games themselves, even though there's this, now, a thriving indie game development scene. But there's all these different things. There's the graphics, the sound, and then all the different programmed components of it, physics engines, all the different interactions that go into a game. It can be really intimidating to get started, especially if you don't kind of know about all of the different tools, especially open source tools that are out there.
Klint: Yeah. So one part of it is that some of those things like graphics and sounds, there's now a lot of assets that you can download and either use for free in a game or buy a license to use. So if you want to make a game, you don't necessarily have to have the artistic chops that you might think you do. But the other really big thing is the emergence of game engines. And these have been around for a while. Unity is, of course, you know, the most famous one. There's the Unreal engine and there's free versions of those out there now. So that's really been part of what's led to this boom in democratization. So, I mean, it's sort of analogous to, you know, the rise of web frameworks and libraries where there are these off the shelf tools that you can use to get started. So you don't have to be building every single part of a game. A physics engine, again, is a good example of something that would be pretty laborious to hand code, but you can now get those basically off the shelf and use them for your own games. In my reporting on this, I spoke with Harmony Honey, an independent game developer. Here's what they had to say about why they got into game development and how open source engines and tools have made it more accessible.
Harmony: Why do I love building games? Honestly, it's because I can put my hands in every part of the process. I can use every part of my brain. I love to make music. I love to make art. I love to solve puzzles. And I feel like writing code is solving little puzzles.
I used, like, GameMaker and learned how to do, like, basic programming until I started learning more programming and doing like C# and eventually decided I want to own everything I make and I want to be able to revisit old projects and update them easily. So it's obvious to choose an open source engine. Godot was a good one, so I went with that and I can make like, like I've had old games that I've done in Game Maker that I want to update, and it's just a challenge to even make sure my license works and to have the correct version of the project. But with open source software, you can download any previous version and do all these things easily.
Klint: Right. So there's now some great open source game engines out there. So there's Godot. And for web games, there's Phaser. Twine is a game engine for making more, like, text based games and interactive fiction that you can, if you want to, add graphics and sounds and programmability. But it makes it possible to make a game with no programming experience, no artistic ambition, whatsoever. Visual artistic ambition whatsoever, I should say. Now we're even also starting to see open source games like Thrive, which is an evolution simulation game that a community of developers have been working on for years and years because they wanted a more sophisticated version of this commercial game called Spore. So it's kind of a classic open source story of some people deciding they, they had a need that wasn't being filled, and so they just decided to work on it themselves. So just this whole community of like-minded people have assembled around this game and made, you know, really like a commercial game that can rival some of what's coming out of the bigger commercial studios now.
Neha: And so when you've been talking about some of these open source games, what comes to mind for me are like online games or apps, right? But I was curious, what does the big burst of more open source pieces and components and games mean for traditional video games?
Martin: Video games is an incredibly profitable industry. I mean, you know, it can make more money than movies nowadays. What do sort of developers think about releasing their IP as open source when there's money to be made? Do you have any examples? 2ff7e9595c
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