V-Play is a third-party game development platform built on top on Qt which allows game developers to quickly take their mockups to a playable game. V-Play achieves this by leveraging the power of QML by offering plugins and components which help in common game development tasks. These include plugins for Visual elements (such as Sprites), Networking modules to enable multiplayer interactions, Social Media/Monetization and so on.

 

 

Sample Games

Thanks to our friends at V-Play, I tried out some of their samples for cross-platform games and were quite impressed around the end results produced by trivial QML code. The first one I tried was the Flappy Bird example (thanks to the weirdo popularity of the game) listed at http://v-play.net/doc/howto-flappybird-game/ . With a bit of reading up of the components, it was quite easy to put together the pieces and get the game running.

 

Another example I found interesting was StackTheBox as it lets you try the physics engine for collisions, in this case between the boxes.

 

 

Documentation

Another brilliant aspect was the excellent documentation of each Component that the V-Play plugins provide. This plays a critical role because when you promise quick releases, having good documentation and examples is absolutely necessary. An example of this is the Facebook integration that has step-by-step instructions at http://v-play.net/doc/plugins1-facebook/ 

 

 

Finally

Those were the few things I got to play with during my evaluation period of the library, and it was quite fun. The selling point was ease of use and the drastic reduction in number of lines of QML code when using V-Play components for things like Monetization, Achievements etc. If some day I decide to create some crazy games, I’m sure where to look at 😀

 

Under the Hood

 

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework for creating desktop and mobile applications with rich user interfaces. It supports all major platforms such as Linux, Mac OSX and Windows along with mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch.

 

Qt Meta-object Language (QML) is a declarative language used to describe UI in a Qt application. The declaration uses JSON-like constructs with the ability to embed JavaScript code inline. The final UI is rendered on an OpenGL accelerated scene graph which allows for a smooth experience. A quick example would look like this-

 

import QtQuick 2.1

import QtQuick.Controls 1.0

 

ApplicationWindow {

   width: 300

   height: 300

   

   Rectangle {

       anchors.fill: parent

       color: colorTextBox.text

       

      TextField {

           id: colorTextBox

           anchors.centerIn: parent

       }

   }

}

This would display a text input field enclosed by a rectangle which changes color to whatever was typed in it-

QtQuick provides a collection of tools and components which developers can use in their applications. Examples would be UI components like Push Buttons etc or models which represent data from a remote source like the XmlListModel