Monday, June 27, 2011

Synergy and Pentagogue

I am enthralled with a piece of software that I have newly discovered. It is available for the Pandora as well as several platforms and architectures, and it is open source. It's called Synergy.

I could go into huge detail about it, but I will condense it because I don't feel like typing a lot this evening, and I'm sure you're not interested in reading tonnes about it either. 

At the most basic level, Synergy is essentially a software KVM switch without the V. That is, it allows you to share one keyboard and one mouse across several desktops. This is absolutely the best "utility" software I have found for the Pandora.

Use case: I am coding a game for the Pandora called Pentagogue. It's not much, and I'll get into detail about it later, but I digress. I had the Pandora next to my laptop, typing on the laptop's keyboard, running my IM/chat client. Normally I would be entirely distracted by the chat client, but with kaede sitting next to asuka I didn't lose any real-estate on my main screen for my project. As a result, I've already gotten through the first part of an SDL tutorial and most of the way through my graphics design for the project.

The PND is up on apps.openpandora.org, and I will be seeking permission to upload it to the unofficial-but-largely-preferred repo.openpandora.org soon.

Now, most of my work today was done on asuka. I'd like to show a bit of a mock-up of the upcoming abstract strategy game Pentagogue from Vulpisoft Technologies (name coming this decade to a household near you.... maybe not). The game mechanics are based upon the ruleset of the Swedish-born game Pentago. The idea is that you play tic-tac-toe with lines of 5 on a 6x6 board. The twist is that after each play, you pick one of the four 3x3 mini-boards which make up the 6x6 board and turn it ninety degrees either clockwise or anti-clockwise. 

Without further ado, here is a mockup of the visuals you'll see:

This, of course, is not the absolutely final design, but it's pretty close. I'm going for a minimalistic yet beautiful design. Please let me know what you think.

Just so you know, I tentatively plan to release this game's code under the terms of the GPL; I plan to release its artwork under a non-restrictive but commercially-prohibitive license like CC BY-NC.

The above "mockup" is released under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND license.


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