engo

TL;DR

This foreword contains these elements:

• An overview of what the tutorial series will be all about;
• A description of the game we’re building during this tutorial series;
• Information about how to set up your development environment.

Tutorial Series

In this series, we will be helping you build your first game with engo. We will start from scratch, and work our way up to a fully-playable game. We will cover topics as:

• The Entity-Component-System paradigm
• Changing scenes within engo
• Writing and using your first custom Shader
• Adding sounds effects and ambiance music to the game
• And probably much more!

In case something wasn’t covered that you would very much like explained, drop us a comment at Gitter, or create an issue at GitHub to request improvements of this tutorial series.

The Game

The game we will be building, looks a lot like Mini Metro. In that game, cities are popping up which you will have to connect with metro lines. More and more people will want to travel from various cities, making the game harder and harder, until the travelers have to wait too long and it’s game over.

In our game, we won’t be connecting travelers and cities with metro lines. Instead, we’re building highways. This has quite some interesting features:

• As two cities become more and more connected, the welfare (and thus the amount of travelers) increases;
• You may want to add public transportation, i.e. buses, for them to use instead of the car;
• Trucks and vans might slow down the transportation network, as they usually tend to drive at a slower pace;
• Make up your own laws when it comes to taxes (gas, mileage, etc.), but also when it comes to how fast different types of vehicles can drive on various lanes.
• You can connect two highways and get an intersection; there’s no need for this to happen in cities.

One can think of much more interesting features, and we could fill a whole page just listing ideas, but for now, let’s teach you how to set up your own development environment.

Development Environment

For the moment, you can use Windows, Linux and OSX.

Build-Time Dependencies

• Linux: sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev xorg-dev libgl1-mesa-dev git-all
• Windows: If you’re running on Windows you’ll need a gcc compiler that the go tool can use and have gcc.exe in your PATH environmental variable. We recommend Mingw since it has been tested.
• OSX: No additional dependencies.

Note that you will only need these installed when you build the game; you will not need these when you want to run the game. You will probably need the ‘runtime’ version of those libraries though (instead of the -dev ones), if you want to run the game.

In any case, you will need to install the latest version of Go. Make sure you correctly set your $GOROOT (which should point to the installation directory of Go, and your $GOPATH, which is basically the root of all your Go projects. Both of these are environment variables.

Within this $GOPATH directory, you will want to create a directory called src. What you want to do now, is open up a terminal / command prompt, go to this location (using the cd command), and then type in the following Go command: go get -u github.com/EngoEngine/engo

This tutorial series is built based on engo v1.0.4, and the master branch possibly contains API changes or other development changes that may not work exactly as stated in the tutorial. To ensure you’re using v1.0.4, do cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/EngoEngine/engo and then checkout the right version with git checkout v1.0.4. This also depends on using v1.0.3 of ecs, so also do cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/EngoEngine/ecs and then checkout the right version with git checkout v1.0.3.

This command will fetch engo from the repository, including all its dependencies.

Now, you will want to create your own project directory for your own game. In Go, it is customary to place the source code of these projects within code repositories, such as GitHub and Bitbucket. The location of these repositories is the “import path” of such a Go project. We should create this directory structure within the src folder of the $GOPATH.

Example

Our GitHub username is EngoEngine, and our project is going to be called TrafficManager. We are hosting the repository on GitHub. This means we want to ensure that this path exists: $GOPATH/src/github.com/EngoEngine/TrafficManager.

Within this directory, we will be creating our game. All our files will be within this directory, and we will be executing all go-commands (such as go build and go run) from this directory (in other words: this directory is our working directory).