We are producing games which can be licensed by various clients, and skinned for their particular needs. The "Shield Game" is one example of that. We are now making architectural decisions regarding how to enable skinning in this game. In making these decisions we need to balance the costs of making things external versus having it hard-coded.
What are the things that clients are going to want to be able to change?
Obviously the visual appearance of the game itself needs to be available for changes. Each of the "screens" a player will see. Perhaps some game-play related values - how fast the bullets move, how many per level, number of lives the player starts with, etc. The availability of a high-score server (this opens a large can of worms, more on this in another post). Other textual items.
At the most basic, this requires an external file which will hold all this data. The visual assets would require either a template or example files, which the client could then use to implement their own skin. A document with information outlining all the requirements for the different skin-able items would also be required.
A worry is that clients would simply hire us to implement the new skin, removing some of the need for this extensive externalization. If that is the only way things are going to be done, then there is no real advantage to externalizing everything, as it increases costs and complexity of the project.
For this project we are going to externalize all the items discussed above. While this might be overkill, it gives us a good example to show to clients, and to judge whether or not clients take advantage of this level of skin-ability.
Leave a comment