This week we had Hack Week event when everyone was welcome to use Innovation time on FOSS projects or even start the new one! I spent most of the time on hacking the Game Store, which I introduced in my previous blogpost. The package is now ready for you in the Build Service.
Simply use the following One Click Install files (openSUSE 11.0, openSUSE 11.1 and openSUSE Factory) or add the games repository and install the gamestore package manually. Game Store uses this repository to download the games, so you should stay subscribed to it after the installation too.
As a bonus I created a very simple One Click Install files catalog which imitates the Game Store look. It is available at gamestore.gk2.sk.
The screenshots for both versions (left Qt, right web) are here so you get the idea how it looks, but the best thing is to try it on your own! 
Big thanks go to randy-sk who helped me with harvesting of icons and screenshots of the games. I am already looking for your feedback!
I was adding some new packages to our games repository in openSUSE Build Service, when I realized that we have over 150 games at this one centralized place! Wouldn’t it be great if there was an application which would allow users to browse through games, filter them by genres or names, view the screenshots and read the information about the games? Players usings Windows can already use “Games for Windows” or “Steam” from Valve, but they also have to pay for the majority of the games. All games in our repository are free and just one click away! I started to hack an application with pretty concrete idea in my mind. You can look at the result of my efforts below (left Games for Windows, right Game Store):
As you can see, Game Store is at the moment quite immature Qt application (actually it is my first Qt app, so my Qt skills suck pretty much right now ), but it is already able to load locally stored XML together with game icons, screenshots and descriptions. User can install new games (using our great One Click Install feature) and launch the installed ones. Later I want to add the ability to synchronize your games settings (configuration + saved games) with Game Store server, so you can have these on any computer and the server could create a hi-score charts for every supported game. There is a long way ahead to go, but I wanted to approach you very early, so you could be involved too. Even if you don’t speak C++ or Qt, you can help us with filling the missing descriptions, gathering game icons and screenshots. Just read the GameStore wiki page to get the idea what needs to be done or clone the git repo and start hacking right away!
Thank you and I hope that GameStore will be a great addition to other openSUSE applications and tools we already have!
Update: See the next blogpost for more information.
We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-based) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).
This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.
If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact me and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.
Game On!
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