Insomniac Games announced the release of the first round of material for a code library that developers can access free of charge.
Speaking at GDC, Insomniac's Mike Acton, Andy Burke, and Geoff Evans spoke with pride about the Nocturnal Initiative, a plan to share some of their tools source code with the game development industry and encourage developers to share their technology, too.
"It's important to us to give back to the development community," said Acton. "we couldn't be doing what we're doing today without having learned from others. We feel it's our obligation as developers to continue that cycle."
The tools are meant to help developers overcome some of the low-level problems that are common to game creation, in turn saving them time and effort, and perhaps helping them grow.
Insomniac's interests aren't entirely altruistic, of course. "Other developers making better games means more people buying the platform and therefore buying more Insomniac games, so it's a win win for everyone," said Acton.
Developers downloading the zip file from the Nocturnal Initiative's site shouldn't expect to have Resistance 2 on their laptops, however. "This is not a game engine," explained Andy Burke. "These are small components" such as debugging utilities, and utilities to help with analyzing the performance of applications. Burke referred to them as "knowns" in the development community.
The first round of code released to the library is low-level stuff, but later releases should provide "more interesting" material. Each round of releases will build on those already added to the library, though Burke cautioned that it's "a slow process."
Insomniac will add more material to the library "when we can" and when the code "is cleaned up enough" to be released to the development community.
