Not easy to pick a topic for the first post – but hey, just let us start with the motivation behind Felgo and how it all started! So here it is, the Felgo story…
I’m Chris, the co-founder of Felgo and since I can remember I always wanted to learn programming to be able to create my own games because that was my biggest passion. It was a dream back then, but I followed my dream and still remember the first game I programmed in C in technical high school 10 years ago: a Bomberman clone for DOS. 🙂
Since then I’ve worked with many programming languages, tools and game engines that simplify the game creation process. What I have learned in the past is that there is a big variety of technology you can use to fulfill your aims, and often the time evaluating them carefully beforehand pays off multiple times in the end. It makes a big difference which type of game you want to create, whether it’s 2D or 3D, for the web, consoles or for mobile phones. My expertise and biggest passion are mobile games, as I really love to do smaller projects and try out different gaming concepts with an easy-to-reach and insanely growing smartphone user base.
I always learned most from studying examples of complete games. You can then apply the learned concepts to create own variations of a game that you truly love to play. And that is our mission with Felgo: Get you going with game development as fast as possible and still give you the flexibility and professional toolchain developers love.
To get you started immediately, we provide easily customizable examples for all kind of 2D games we love so much: from platformers, side-scrollers or action games to strategy games like tower defense. You have access to the full source code and tutorials how the game works. The games are made out of game components, which you can then use to create own games within days. These components handle issues you normally have at mobile development like different screen sizes, multitouch & gestures, animations, particles, physics and audio across all platforms. Another time-saver is our collection of ready-made components for popular gaming services for monetization (via ads or in-app-purchases), analytics or social networks like Facebook or Game Center for iOS.
The mentioned toolchain contains the full-fletched IDE QtCreator including syntax highlighting, auto-completion, integrated documentation, a debugger, profiler, versioning control integration and a GUI designer to speed up development time. For balancing and testing it is possible to change your properties at runtime during testing on the desktop and even on the device. You can then deploy your games to your mobile devices without the need of installing any platform SDKs, because you can let it build on our servers. That allows deployment to iOS also from your Windows machine, so no need to buy a Mac for that. 😉
From my experience, the actual polishing, balancing and content creation like multiple levels for a game is what takes at least the same time as the game coding itself. And especially for mobile games the hardest part is to keep your gamers motivated to keep playing the game. For that purpose, we have built a flexible level editor you can use during development, and even integrate it into your game so the users can create, share and balance new levels on their mobiles. This allows you to build whole communities around your cool game idea!
Another high priority task we had in mind when designing Felgo was to give full flexibility to our users: the engine source code is modifiable and the technology (i.e. which IDE or programming language you use) is up to you. The recommended path, however, is to use QtCreator as it works on all desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux) and JavaScript. You can still use native C++, Objective-C or Java code to use existing source code (however keep in mind that only C++ will work on all platforms), or integrate platform plugins if Felgo is not supporting the native feature you demand yet.
In the posts that will follow the next days and weeks, Alex my co-founder and I will share details about the concepts behind Felgo. If you are interested in specific blog topics, let us know in the comments or in the forum section. You can already download Felgo SDK from our public beta area, and create games for the desktop platforms Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and for the mobile platforms iOS, Android, Symbian & Meego!
We would love to hear your thoughts about our mission and your experience of using Felgo!
