Wow, time flies. We’ve been promising updates about GDC, we’ve been promising games, and we’ve promised announcements. Now, then, it is time to live up to at least one of those obligations.
Strongman Games is very pleased to announce OhMyGame!
There’s a great write-up by the godly Simon Parkin over at Gamasutra. The Q&A says it all, but I’ll sum it up here anyway.
OhMyGame is a Flash-based, web-native game development environment. Once we’ve launched, you just head to http://www.omga.me, then log in and you’re presented with an editor interface that lets you quickly and simply deal with most game development tasks:
- Visual coding: A simple, powerful system for gameplay coding. Instead of dealing with UML-based spaghetti, you’re simply stacking cause and effect blocks to construct behaviours. If that sounds too good to be true, head on over to the Gamasutra piece for a more thorough description.
- Level editor: Tile-based editor featuring layers, waypoints, fully manipulable props, automatic edge detection, collision volumes and much, much more. Will be expanded to include what’s really, seriously, completely earth-shatteringly awesome procedural level generation tech. We’re so stoked about this we considered renaming the company Industrial Fucking Furnaces.
- Asset management: OhMyGame deals splendidly with your graphics, sounds and animation and even has some tricks up its sleeve. You manage graphics and animation in the same interface as your physics and collision detection, meaning you bring your world and characters to life in a single place.
- Physics: Physics sits at the very heart of OhMyGame. It’s nothing special, just completely and utterly natural as physics ought to be: It handles collisions and lets you create living, responsive worlds with proper heft.
- And everything sits in the cloud: Yep. We host your files, we manage your data, we compile your code — everything is done off-site. You don’t need to keep track of your files, you don’t need to worry about backup and you can collaborate with anyone from anywhere in the world on whatever project you can imagine.
- That means everything can be shared: And it will be. You can share assets, code, levels, even entire game templates. Absolutely everything you’ll ever author in OMGame can be shared. Of course, you’ve got a measure of control — sharing happens on your terms.
- Yes, shared: No longer will indie developers, students, hobbyists or even game industry professionals be separated. Everything they ever make can, if they choose, benefit everyone else. This is the revolution, comrades.
Astute readers may have noticed that I haven’t promised Molehill support, UI tools, networking and a slew of other obvious features, but that’s because they won’t feature in the beta and we don’t want to promise too much right away.
It’s coming, though. We’re prepared for Molehill, we’re introducing robust UI tools as soon as the core features are refined, networking is the very nature of the beast and truly radical stuff like a built-in synthesizer for run-time generation of music and sound effects rather than chunky, poorly compressed MP3 files.
Just trust us when we say that OhMyGame will change the way you make games. You’ll make games the way you think about them, the way they appear like little flickering dreamscapes on the back of your eyelids, like systems — like beautiful little machines. No code, no IDEs, no compilers, no worrying about cross-platform compatibility, API revisions and conventions.
We’ve got it handled. Just sign up to the OhMyGame beta, and all shall be well.
