Motivation

Craving FUDGE

Since 2010, courses for game design and development are being taught regularly at the faculty of Digital Media at Hochschule Furtwangen University (HFU) in the Black Forest, Germany. Besides development environments like Unreal Engine, Phaser, Processing etc. and, for more advanced students, our inhouse-development FUSEE, the most prominent tools for setting up and programming the game mechanics have been

• Adobe Animate for 2D-Games, as it's been a standard tool for decades,
• and Unity for 3D-Games, which became very popular since its first release in 2005

Both environments offer editors to visually setting up scenes, create assets and attach scripts to objects in the game, making it easier for beginners to enter the realms of game development.

However, since most of the courses at HFU focus on practical experience and exercises outside of the lectures and seminars, remote communication, reviews, exchange and examination over the internet is vital for successful didactic in these courses. Shortcomings of existing tools in this area inhibit their adoption in an academic environment for teaching and thus drive the creation of FUDGE. That's its main focus.

What is FUDGE?

• A lightweight open-source game engine and editor
• for audiovisual 2D- and 3D-games
• the editor running on common desktop devices (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• for use in academic environment
• to teach students how to create digital games and interactive applications
• and for rapid prototyping in productive environments
• deploying results to most common platforms (desktop, mobile, web) and operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• since it's completely browser based

Aren't there sweeter treats?

• commercial game-engines
  • mostly use proprietary data formats that are not human readable
  • difficult to handle with version control systems
  • geared towards player experience, good performance, speed and visual excellence
  • come with a lot of features rarely used in basic game design
  • bloating project size, increasing learning efforts, impeding collaboration and communication
  • are frequently updated, thus creating incompatabilites and the need to spend time and efforts to keep up to date
  • are restricted in use by commercial interests and licensing
• non commercial engines
  • don't come with elaborated and integrated editors
  • mostly use deep class hierarchies instead of COI (composition over inheritance)
  • thus requiring a steep learning curve and heavy coding from the start without visual feedback
• making it difficult to use these engines for teaching in an academic environment

What are the ingredients for FUDGE?

• pure modern technologies of development for the web
• HTML, CSS, TypeScript, Node.js, WebGL, JSON, GLSL, Electron, Golden Layout

What are the main features of FUDGE?

• visual scene-, mesh-, graphics- and animation-editor
• to quickly create simple assets and structures within one environment
• thus flattening the learning curve for beginners by modelling the structures that are later enhanced by increasingly complex scripting
• human readable document formats allow to examine and manipulate data structures
• support version control, code reviews and communication among students, teachers, developers
• no separation of runtime and designtime data, games run right out of the source-repository
• client- and server-components for network-gaming
• running on low performance hardware

What is FUDGE not?

• highly performant, overpowered
• frequently updated, risking incompatabilites
• safe, since code is completely open, even at runtime
• competing with full fledged game engines

Why the name FUDGE?

• it's the acronym for Furtwangen University Didactic Game Editor