The One With D

More D Games From Japan

Well, I just learned something new. There’s a feature over at The Independent Gaming Source (which I found via Jay Barnson) on Japanese indie shmups (shoot’em ups). The main article is a great introduction to the genre and, of course, mentions Kenta Cho. But the really interesting from the perspective of a D user comes in the Addendum regarding the technology used in many of these games:

Development of homebrew shmups has been led by a number of diverse
technologies. A lot of the Japanese developers use the D language,
perhaps inspired in part by Kenta Cho’s games and the D source included
with many of them. Developers such as Isshiki, HIZ, and Kenmo all use
D, and ABA games’ influence is apparent. Game Maker is more dominant in
the west, with very active forums and many good shmups being created.
However, a wide variety of technologies are being used, as witnessed by
the volume of threads and visitors at Shmup-Dev, a site dedicated to
shooter development and help. One of the more interesting, and useful
technologies helping out shmup developers is Kenta Cho’s BulletML.
Created as an XML markup to describe bullet behaviour, there have been
numerous bindings to programming languages such as D, C/C++, Java, and
even Flash.

I had no idea so many Japanese indies were using D for their games. Looks like Kenta Cho as become a sort of unofficial ambassador for D in Japan. I’ve not looked at the games linked from the article to see which use D, so you’ll have to check them out for yourself to see which is which.

Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, games, game programming, Japan, Kenta Cho, shmups