Hungering for Game Utilities

Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs*

At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:

• Android, Android TV, Windows, OSX, and Linux
• Google Cardboard
• Google Play Games Services sign-in and leaderboards on Android
• Level customization

Zooshi serves as a demonstration of how to build Android games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google:

• Motive drives our Animation system, giving life and movement to the characters and environment.
• CORGI, the Component Oriented Reusable Game Interface, is an Entity-Component system designed to allow users to define complicated game objects as collections of modular, custom-defined behaviors.
• FlatUI is a straightforward immediate mode GUI system with a light footprint that makes building up user interfaces a breeze.
• Scene Lab allows designers to design levels and edit entities from right in the game without needing to use an external editor.
• Breadboard provides an easy to use node based scripting system for editing entity behaviors thats accessible to designers without deep knowledge of programming.
• FPLBase is a cross-platform API layer, for abstracting low-level tasks like reading input and creation of graphical contexts.

As in our previous release, Pie Noon, we also made extensive use of Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.

You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can apply these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to toss some sushi around while you’re at it!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google thats dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

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