"So You Want to Make a Game?"

[noahgibbs]

We've recently added a lot to SkotOS. That's nice. But where does somebody get started?

Here's the first big change: you don't just pick up SkotOS and make a game with it. SkotOS is a game-making library, not really a standalone game. Instead, you'll probably want to start with The Gables: "https://github.com/ChatTheatre/gables_game". In The Gables, you'll find a place to add files for just your one game without making your own copy of the whole SkotOS "skoot" tree of files. This also means you can see, at a glance, what a SkotOS game changes and what it leaves the same.

The Gables comes with both a local-dev script to develop on your Mac and a script to set up a fresh new Linode (or similar VPS) with all the scripts you need: websocket relays, an authentication server and of course the DGD server itself, now able to cold-boot a fresh instance from a repeatable start point. There's no reason these kinds of scripts couldn't exist for Windows or Linux local dev or for non-Linode VPS providers, of course. We accept Pull Requests, especially if you're willing to also help us test periodically so the scripts keep working.

For documentation we recommend starting with SkotOS-Doc: "https://ChatTheatre.github.io/SkotOS-Doc". There's a fair bit of introductory and conceptual material there, as well as deep dives into many of the game systems. It's not as comprehensive as the older non-public SkotOS wiki (which we're converting, slowly), but it's a lot more up-to-date.

And of course there are these forums. In the old days most random DGD-language questions started on the DGD email list -- which is now defunct. Specific questions on DGD or the Kernellib can go to their GitHub projects and the same is true for SkotOS and The Gables. But for questions, not necessarily bug reports or feature requests, this forum is the best place I know to ask the community.