/project-537

Project-537 is a remake of famous video game Constructor by System 3.

Primary LanguageGo

What

Project-537 is a remake of famous video game Constructor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_(video_game%29 by System 3.

537 is number of weeks passed from the beginning of 21st century, that is, from 2001-01-01.

Design

Overall architecture consists of two independent components: Backend and Frontend.

Components may be implemented in different programming languages or even run on different machines. Communication is done via ZeroMQ messages.

Why components stuff:

First reason is that it really helps to concentrate on one thing. Also helps to localize bugs.

Second reason: it allows good game designs to reincarnate into new UI bodies and live forever young. There are many examples where excellent game design ideas, features are immortal: Tetris, Elite, Fallout. I think Constructor has great unique features too. But years pass, platforms change, it's not so easy to run good old games on todays Windows7/Ubuntu/MacOSX. What if they just had game logic and visualization separated... Somebody could hack up a new shiny GUI for good old games, now with 32bit colors, shaders, all modern graphics stuff.

Backend

This is the calculating heart of the system. It maintains internal state of the game, processes user actions from Frontend and tells it what it can show.

For the sake of exploration i will try to implement backend in Go.

Frontend

This component is responsible for interaction with users: rendering game map, playing sounds, parsing keyboard/mouse/etc input into commands for backend.

For fun i will try to implement frontend as web application.