Gaming is a hot trend nowadays! All of us have touched upon some or all the interesting games! While playing the games that impress you, have you ever come across a random thought of creating your very own game? If yes, then your thought is taken care off with Sage Studios 2D Game Creator for any platform ‘Dash’.
A Visual programming tool and a game creator, DASH, an HTML5 based software and web service that boasts of running on any device, brings to you complete set of tools and courses that will make you learn how to write a programming code in much simpler and creative way. The software is powered by HTML5 canvas for rendering games, so any platform which supports HTML5 can play games created by DASH.
The Game programming school S.A.G.E- school of advance graphics and engineering was started way back in 2006. S.A.G.E delivers diploma in game programming courses which covers latest game engines and different platforms. Along with school, they have an in house game development studio where they develop games based on own IP .At present, the studio is focusing on creating casual mobile and web games.
Priyadarshi Chowdhary, CEO of Delhi Based S.A.G.E Studios and the maker of DASH nods to the thought that this software stands out as a treat to gaming students, teachers, hobbyists and designers
“We have seen many students struggling with the basic concept of programming languages. And others similar software’s in the market does not covers the real flow of programming language. DASH is created very close to object oriented programming language, which makes understanding of real language quick. We have added all the basic concepts of real programming language into it and everyone who wants to create quick games prototypes should pay attention to DASH.”, Priyadarshi shares with AnimationXpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala.
A rundown of chief features that DASH gives out centers around the areas that it is Powered by HTML, Multi-Platform support ( Create and Play ) , OOPS Based, Visual Programming Editor , Dynamic creation of object, 2D Physics support, Particles , Scene Editor, Animation Editor, Paint Editor, Basic editing features like cut, copy, paste, undo, redo , Centralized project management for anywhere access, Dropbox integration for assets, Instant play, Project export for native mobile apps, Project sharing and learning 8 months have been taken to create the software and the beta offering of DASH has been launched on the 10th of this month.
At present, only single player games can be developed in the software, but the future holds a series of upgrades to it. Priyadarshi tells us that A novice cans jumpstart creating games in this software by Creating a new class based on game requirement( player, enemy etc.), then Choosing a basic image for your class for visual representation, further create objects of class and place them into scene. And finally start writing code for your class in code editor.
So now the big question arises!! Is the software free or paid? Well, you have the chance to make the most of it till it’s free! Priyadashi points out more, “We are giving basic version of DASH free to the gaming community, but in near future we are planning to charge for premium services.”
Priyadarshi has already laid plans for implementing 3D games support in the next version of DASH and also will include paint editor for creating custom art and animation.
Talking about the inspiration behind DASH, he shares, “Our reference point for creating DASH is SCRATCH, software created by MIT labs. But SCRATCH lacks many features in terms of programming and platform support. So we wanted to create software which overcomes those features and which can be more users friendly.
The Team at Sage studios has used limeJS for DASH frontend and chosen gamvas game engine for rendering user created games as it is easy and has a neat design.
Elaborating more on what sets DASH apart from other gaming software’s, Priyadarshi, highlights, “The Multi-platform support makes DASH good software to be explored! Another one would be that it is close to real world programming language and we’ve tried to keep the flow of DASH as close to object oriented programming language. Next would be 2D Physics and in the software we’ve installed box2d physics engine for creating physics based games and finally Scene and Animation Editor in which inbuilt scene and animation editor makes the software more powerful.”
On the pictorial front, DASH is composed with free sets of art work developed by Sage studios. Users can use these art works freely in their projects. Priyadarshi adds further, “We have integrated the dropbox into DASH for user private content. User can link their existing dropbox account to DASH and can use their personal content. Plus in future we are planning to link Google drive and box cloud services.
Speaking more on the challenges while making DASH, he informs, “Maintaining all features on every platform is an achievement for us. The biggest challenge we faced by creating DASH is to maintain the load time of our software, creating dynamic elements in HTML5 puts lots of over head on cpu. Initially it was taking 80 seconds to launch the whole software on iPAD, but we reduced the time to 8 seconds by optimizing and changing the core architecture. Another challenge we faced is maintaining event handling on all the platforms. Some events works doesn’t work on all platforms, so we created lots of hacks to manage them. Playing sounds on all the platforms is a major setback in HTML5 as every browser supports different sound codec. So to cover all the platform user has to export sound file into 3 different formats.”
The full version of DASH would be released this year in October and not only this, but the studio is also releasing its two major mobile games that is set for delivery in July and August.
To view Dash Software, follow the links below:
The teaser link is : https://vimeo.com/67295430
DASHwebsite: http://www.dashplay.net/ <http://www.dashplay.net/index.php >
SAGE website : http://www.sageinfolabs.com
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