基于浏览器的OhMyGame旨在成为最有效、最符合用户需要的游戏开发工具包，Strongman Games宣布其于本周开始内测。该平台主要关注游戏开发的社交层面，用户间可以通过此工具共享代码、关卡和其他资源。平台开发者Erlend Grefsrud在采访中表示，OhMyGame的目标是为所有人提供游戏开发工具，而不仅仅是程序员。

omga.me的定位

简而言之，OhMyGame就是让开发者可以使用浏览器制作游戏，并通过社交网络与他人分享所有的代码和关卡。OhMyGame中的所有工具均可用于2D游戏，其主要目的在于让更多人参与游戏开发和设计。

该平台的基本原理是简单的因果关系，平台上储存有大量不断更新的逻辑模块，分为起因和结果两类。起因包括冲突测试或物体间的距离，其对应的结果便是游戏中的移动、计算和物体的产生等等。用户所要做的只是把这些模块组合起来，通过拖拽和放置逻辑模块来组成行为。这些行为可以在不同的项目间共享并重复使用，这使得游戏代码既可服务多人又不过于简单。游戏邦认为，OhMyGame的目标在于使游戏开发从编程转向设计。

平台上还会有新颖的关卡编辑工具、专门用于处理声效的工具以及健全的UI工具，但测试版中不包含这些内容。Grefsrud表示，他们希望任何人都能通过这个平台制作游戏，包括不熟悉编程的人。

OhMyGame

OhMyGame的来源

2005年，当Grefsrud仍是个游戏新闻记者时，他就开始有制作基于行为模式的游戏开发工具的想法，这便是OhMyGame的雏形。他希望能够建立起数字销售平台，开发者可以在平台上出售、交易或共享游戏及制作游戏的资源。当年的想法并没有实现，但他从未放弃。Grefsrud的技术指导Rohan一直都有着类似的想法。Rohan用过诸如Multimedia Fusion以及后来的DarkBASIC等游戏开发工具，他十分欣赏这些使游戏开发大众化的框架模式，但同时也认为这些工具还存在改善的空间。

2006年，二人相识于伦敦南岸大学的游戏设计课程上。他们发现当时有25个参加课程的人想要制作游戏，但却不知道从何开始，而只有他们对游戏编码有着自己的想法。这使二人认识到真正将创造性思维转变为游戏是多么艰难的事。游戏邦获悉，他们参加2008年Dare to be Digital活动时达成一致想法。开发者花大量时间解决技术问题，无法将自己的想法变成现实，这是普遍问题。他们决定改变这种状况，于是二人成立公司，开发OhMyGame便成为公司的主要战略计划。

项目启动前Grefsrud的所作所为

Grefsrud之前是游戏新闻记者，同时兼顾网页和图片设计。他希望自己能够进军游戏业，而每周编写数篇游戏评论正好让他了解视频游戏的运作方式。

公司合伙人Kalli也对自己从事的摄影和广告业感到厌烦，希望能够在更有趣的游戏业获得一席之地。2004年，二人在重新制作某挪威游戏网站时相识。2006年两人同往伦敦南岸大学进修，也正是在那里遇见曾在法国制作游戏、电影和音乐的Rohan。他们从伦敦南岸大学毕业后，得到大学人才培养计划EAS的支持和资助。

omga.me受欢迎的原因

考虑到Flash游戏市场的表现和独立游戏开发者的崛起，Grefsrud认为OhMyGame会很受欢迎。今年，他曾与许多参加GDC大会的独立开发者交谈过，多数人认为虽然获得了计算机科学学位，但他们是游戏设计师而并非程序员。更为有趣的是，这些人并不想要编程，他们希望能够制作游戏。很多人用过Game Maker或Multimedia Fusion，不是因为他们不会编程，而只是想使用适用于手头工作的代码。

OhMyGame吸引开发者之处还在于可输出Flash格式，目前Flash游戏的销售市场已成形，这意味着开发者可轻松向用户展示作品。游戏邦认为，小型开发团队完全可以只靠Flash游戏生存。

OhMyGame工具可开发的游戏类型

使用目前的测试版可以开发街机型系统驱动游戏。UI工具还未成形，因此开发RPG游戏可能会有些难度，但并非不可实现。此外，OhMyGame上已有成熟的关卡编辑工具，支持超大地图，因此目前也可以选择塞尔达类的冒险游戏。物理引擎就位，这意味着开发者可以制作基于物理原理的游戏。

一旦UI工具完成，接下来公司计划关注可适用于RPG和社交游戏的网络工具。OhMyGame团队正关注最新的Flash 3D加速API，他们认为这势必会掀起一场变革，因为用户将在浏览器上体验到主机游戏才有的感觉。

omga.me平台的优缺点

用法简单和资源共享无疑是平台的优势所在，用户可以共享包括代码、图形设计、关卡、音效和音乐等所有资源。游戏邦认为，平台为游戏开发降低了门槛。

目前网页技术标准混乱是平台存在的主要缺点，公司希望能够使用HTML5和WebGL，但还做不到。公司只能坚持走Flash路线，现在这是在网络上展示媒体的标准方式，也是确保开发者的内容能够跨平台展示的唯一可靠方法。

Grefsrud表示，系统最大的缺点在于公司资金不足。任何人给予的帮助对他们来说都很重要，包括用户、其他游戏开发者、跨国公司或对项目感兴趣的投资者。

omga.me一年内的发展目标

Grefsrud希望能够发布许多使用OhMyGame开发的游戏，完成程序的测试并向开发者提供服务。他希望平台能够有足够的用户，使OhMyGame成为可盈利项目，更希望看到人们制作游戏的方式能发生些许改变。他期待看到OhMyGame面向公众开放，用户可以自主购买、销售、交易或共享他们制作的所有资源。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Interview: Can OhMyGame! Democratize Game Development Through The Browser?

Strongman Games announced this week the launch of the OhMyGame closed beta. OhMyGame aims to be the most efficient, user-friendly game development toolset for use in a web browser.

The platform will focus heavily on the social aspects of game development, allowing users to share their code, assets and levels with other OhMyGame users.

In this GameSetWatch interview, co-founder Erlend Grefsrud discusses OhMyGame’s goal of providing game development tools that are accessible to anyone, not just coders.

What’s your pitch with omga.me?

In brief, OhMyGame lets you make games in your browser, share all your code, assets and levels across a social network and output for a number of platforms.

It is a web-based, fully integrated game development suite with heavy emphasis on sharing. It’s all the tools you need to make 2D games, such as a visual code editor, level editor, UI tools, sound tools and testing facilities. The goal is to make sure absolutely every single thing authored in OhMyGame can be reused and shared, to reward experimentation and collaboration.

The overall goal is to make game development – or rather game design – accessible to way more people than is the case today. Our visual programming is not your traditional UML-based spaghettigeddon, nor is it quite as formalistic as Scratch.

Instead, it’s based on a simple cause-effect model. We present a library of logic blocks, divided into causes and effects. Causes perform checks, such as collision testing or distances between objects, which then trigger effects that handle movement, calculations, spawning objects and so on.

Everything you need to make games has been encapsulated in these blocks and we will add more and more over time. You arrange your game logic by dragging and dropping these logic blocks to form behaviors. These behaviors can then be shared or reused across projects, making gameplay code into something really malleable and generalized without oversimplification. The idea is to turn programming into design.

Of course, we’ve got level editing tools that will eventually feature a very novel approach to procedural generation and an integrated synthesizer that handles sound. We’re working on robust UI tools as well, but they’re sidelined in favor of launching a beta with basic functionality.

It isn’t about the browser-native game development environment or the multiplatform export or any of that, it’s really about allowing people to design rather than program games. We want to let anyone make games. Not just engineers or designers who program, but anyone should be able to construct their own game systems.

Mike Acton, engine director at Insomniac, tweeted that he didn’t look for the Citizen Kane of video games, he wants the Kim Kardashian of games: an opportunity for everyone, no matter how talentless, to make games. We also want that: way greater diversity.

It’s pretty obvious to me that no medium or artform can really diversify, both in terms of reaching a broad audience and cultivating a broad range of practitioners, until it has developed a vernacular. Until the instruments of creation are widely available, their application will be transfixed by formalists. In the case of video games, those formalists are coders.

I totally agree that code is the literacy of the 21st century and that programming computers is a vitally important skill, but I also believe that concessions must be made if a broader segment of the population is to learn how to program. We need domain-specific programming languages, like Don Norman argued that we need domain-specific computers. That ultimately means developing programming models that reflect the task at hand rather than the working of the computer performing the task.

We’re trying to do that for games. We’ve only taken baby steps, but I’m designing entire games using OhMyGame and I’m an awful programmer.

Ultimately, we see it as making a camera or a synthesizer – it’s a tool made specifically for the needs of the task at hand. It’s not an engineering environment with a level editor or a level editor with some scripting utilities; it’s a game development environment anyone can use.

Where did the idea for omga.me originate?

From a hundred different places, as these things usually do. I started speccing a game development tool back in 2005, when I was still a games journalist, based on a behavior-driven model not entirely dissimilar to the one OhMyGame features. I wanted to integrate that environment with a digital distribution platform where people could sell, trade or give away both their games and the resources used to create them. That never happened, of course, but I kept it in mind.

Our technical lead, Rohan, also had ideas like this from a long time back. He got into programming through game development tools like Multimedia Fusion and later DarkBASIC, and really admired the way these frameworks made game development accessible to a wider audience and also saw them as excellent ways to learn maths and programming. Incidentally, he also thought they were pretty terrible and could be improved vastly.

We met doing a game design course at London Southbank University in 2006, where we found that we were the only people in the course who had any idea of how to code a game. There were 25 people in our year who wanted to make games, but they couldn’t because they didn’t have the slightest idea of how to do it. That opened our eyes to just how hard it is for creative individuals to actually get to the making games bit.

We saw similar things when we participated in Dare to be Digital 2008. Even at that stage, after numerous screening processes and – in some cases – post-grad degrees in game development, people still screwed up basic implementation. They spent ages getting their technology running, or they had communication problems, or they simply couldn’t formalize their ideas. There are too many barriers to entry.

We decided we need to break those down. We had that idea when we started the company, and it was always our overall technology strategy.

What were you doing before working on this project?

I used to be a games journalist and also did some web and graphics design on the side, and wanted to get into games. Turns out writing several game reviews a week was an excellent way to learn how video games work, I would really recommend that trial by fire to aspiring game designers.

This coincided brilliantly with Kalli, our third co-founder, who had just gotten tired of the film and advertising industries and saw games as a much more interesting prospect. We met while relaunching a Norwegian games site in 2004, and moved to London in 2006 to go to university together.

That’s where we met Rohan, were accepted into Dare to be Digital and realized that we made a pretty good team. Rohan spent most of his youth in France, where he made games, movies and music – a bit of a creative powerhouse that eventually ended up loving code.

Once we graduated from London South Bank University, we were accepted into the university’s start-up incubator, the EAS, who has graciously been funding and supporting us for the last 18 months.

How confident are you that there’s an audience for the site?

Judging by the activity in the Flash game market as well as the surge of indie developers, I think there’s a huge interest. I stayed in a hostel with a whole bunch of indie developers at GDC this year, and a lot of them regarded themselves as game designers rather than programmers, even when they had computer science degrees. What was really interesting was that they didn’t particularly want to program: they wanted to make games.

They didn’t see programming as the aesthetic of game development; instead they seemed to consider it a necessary evil. Several of them already used Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion, not because they couldn’t program but because they wanted to use tools suited for the task at hand.

I also think OhMyGame is attractive because it outputs to Flash. There’s a huge existing ecosystem around the sales, marketing and distribution of Flash games, meaning it’s easy to get your games in front of an audience. It’s hard to get rich, sure, but it’s hard to get rich anywhere. If you’re a small, dedicated and hungry team of developers, surviving on Flash games is far from impossible.

Some of the major sites do pretty good licensing deals and they commission work – look at Adult Swim, for instance. They do an excellent job commissioning content, paying well and giving developers lots of control. I’m sure they’re not going to be the last Flash portal focused on quality content.

What sorts of games do the tools facilitate?

Any 2D game you can imagine, really. At the moment, and through the early stages of beta, we will focus on arcade-style games emphasizing system-driven gameplay. We haven’t finished the UI tools yet, so RPG-alikes and point’n’clickers will be a bit awkward (but by no means impossible), but we’ve noticed that most developers tend to stick with brawlers, shoot’em-ups and platformers anyway, and our tools certainly facilitate them.

However, we’ve got pretty sophisticated level editing tools that support absolutely enormous maps, so Zelda-style adventure games are a definite possibility. You can make continent-sized maps, and as many of them as you like. In addition, a modern physics engine sits right at the heart of our game object handling, meaning physics-based gameplay is a given.

Once the UI tools are in, we want to focus on network tools that facilitate RPGs and social games. I’m a little bit wary of talking about a certain three-letter abbreviation for online games, but of course we’re considering those as well.

We’re watching Molehill, the new 3D acceleration API for Flash, with immeasurable interest. We think that’s really going to change things, since that means most internet users will suddenly have access to console-quality games in the browser.

Obviously, we’ll support that. At first, we’ll just port our 2D tools to 3D, but being tactical chaps we assumed that Adobe would do something like this, and planned the architecture of the engine so we could expand to 3D if necessary. It just happened a little sooner than we expected.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the platform?

The strengths are undoubtedly the ease of use and the massive emphasis on sharing. We want our users to at least consider sharing everything. They can share code, graphical assets, levels, sounds, and music – absolutely everything.

The true strength of this is the democratization of game development. We’re not about being biggest, most high-tech, most feature-rich. We’re about lowering the barrier of entry and letting the masses in.

The weakness of the platform is primarily the confused jumble of technologies that make out the web nowadays. We would love to do HTML5 and WebGL, but it’s simply not viable right now. Everyone’s talking about it, sure, but we’re not seeing that market congeal for a long time.

That means we’re stuck with Flash, which has its flaws, but interestingly it’s the most standardized way to display media on the web right now. Standards advocates will likely froth at the mouth when they read this, but Flash is the single most reliable way to ensure that your content displays across platforms the way you intended.

Of course, the ultimate weakness of the system is that we are three guys working on a shoestring budget. We’re going to need all the help we can get, whether it comes from users, from other game developers or from multinationals or investors who take an interest. We’ve got this thing up and working, but where it goes from here, how it expands and develops – that depends as much on circumstance as our efforts.

Where do you hope to be in 12 months time?

In twelve months, we’d like to have released several games built on OhMyGame, completed our beta program and opened the service to the great unwashed. We’d like to have enough users that OhMyGame in itself is a profitable business – and hopefully notice an ever so slight difference in the way people make games.

OhMyGame should be out of beta and open for business. We have deployed our procedural level generation technology and all the sharing functionality, enabling users to buy, sell, trade or share absolutely everything they make. We would love to export to several platforms, but our emphasis will be on the web tools at the moment.

We hope to have amassed a few thousand regular users, enough to make OhMyGame either a break-even business or a compelling investment opportunity. That’s the business concerns, of course – on a more idealistic note, we’d love to see more games! (Source: Game Set Watch)