Games

This is the developer documentation for GNOME Games. If you're a regular user, see Games' main page for help.

Goals

• List the available video games, whatever their format is (native, Wine, old system ROM, game package for a particular engine, web game...).
• Display metadata for the games.
• Download the required programs to run the available games.
• Treat games as works of art instead of files or applications.
• Implement GNOME 3's Finding and Reminding layout on games.

Non-goals

• Integrate a game market, but we could ease integration of some external markets like Steam, GOG, Humble Store or itch.io.
• Being a controller manager: other projects exists for the GNOME Control Center and we should integrate with them.

Discussion

Currently, there's different types of games playable with GNOME, and different ways of doing so:

• native games can be launched via the Activities Overview, but you won't be able to display them by clicking on the "Games" category in GNOME Shell 3.8;
• game packs poorly integrated to their native engine or to the desktop (Doom, LÖVE...);
• emulated games, which need an emulator (such as MAME, Mednafen or DOSBox) to run;
• Windows games, which need Wine - when they're willing to work with Wine;

• Web games, which can be added to the Overview thanks to the Web Apps feature of Web, but still need a browser to work, if not a third-party plugin (like Flash or Unity).

Goals and scope

• Making the most, if not all of an user's games available from one place;
• Bringing a common interface to multiple emulators;
• Keeping the actions needed between launching the app and launching a game to a minimum;
• Needing as little configuration as possible.

Tentative Designs

• Gamepad Navigation

• Snapshots

• "Developers" view

• Initial concepts

• Inputs

• Internet Arcade: potential game ROM source.

• Libretro cores

• Metadata

• Video filters

• Web games

• Gamepad database

• GOG games

Needs design

• Non-searchable games and search folders integration ("+" button).
• System preferences (the "gear" button).
• The application menu.

Relevant Art

Relevant Art

Related Projects

• GNOME Games: the games collection formerly packaged as gnome-games on several distros.

• GNOME Video Arcade: project achieving some of our goals in a GNOME 2 style.

• Gamepad settings: a project we should support and rely on.

• Lutris: a similar open source project for Linux.

• Phoenix: a similar open source project for Linux.

• Libretro: an ecosystem mainly composed of game console emulator and game engine libraries sharing the same API.

• DOSBox: a DOS emulator.