So many aspects

Last time I wrote about the roles (different kind of jobs) that are required for developing an open source game. Let's focus now on one such job (Programmer) and see how many aspects this single job contains for developing for example open source strategy games.

• GUI programming (almost all games have some sort of graphical user interface)
• 2D/3D graphics programming (to display the game world, map, ...)
• Serialization/Deserialization (to store and retrieve game states (aka savegames))
• Network programming (for multiplayer capabilities)
• AI (for computer opponents)
• Data modelling (to store and advance a game model)
• Algorithms (like path finding)

This means that there are many different topics one must know about to make it all coming true. Of course, the most efficient way is to use (and know) as many stock solutions to these problems as possible.