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Mon Mar 24 06:29:06 EDT 2008


is to bring standard board/card games to the OLPC, with a few modified
features that utilize the unique XO hardware and mesh network system,
as well as have some kind of educational element, be it in teaching
the game itself, or in terms of being written using very scalable OO
code.

What I am a bit unclear about is what exactly is unique about the
project: many of these games are already available in python and
pygame (which from what I have been able to tell is the main/preferred
game development API), so just getting the games up and running would
probably be more of a porting job than anything else, with the
additional features such as added network communication and game
recording/playback perhaps, along with any additional AI.

This leads me to wonder what the central aspect of this project is:
- Is it simply getting a whole bunch of games up and running? (from
reading through the games at lists.laptop.org archives that doesn't sound
to be right)
- Is the more important element being the creation of a more general
"framework", and if so, how general would really be useful? From
personal experience programming games in Java, a too-vague top-down
approach really doesn't help anyone, and even similar games quickly
resist useful OO structure.  Realistically, creating such a framework
would not obviously make future game development of anything other
than relatively minor rules variations "easy".  This is not to say
that it can't be done, I am just wondering if the idea could be
clarified a bit more.
- The other issue that I was wondering about was who is the future
game development targeted to? Future dedicated developers, or the XO
recipients themselves? I ask this b/c, again, from experience, I
taught myself to program while sitting in math class and messing
around with the games on my TI-83+.  The BASIC language and
straightforward syntax really got me excited about being able to write
my own games, and if that is the primary aim of the project, then
perhaps this game framework would be part of a larger project of
creating a very simple programming development (a la BASIC), and these
games would serve as full-fledged examples to play around with and
modify.

I apologize for the long-windedness, I have simply given this project
a lot of thought, and I was hoping to get a bit more direction before
submitting my proposal.

Thanks for your help.

-Ben C


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