(Real) Real-Time Game Development

Picture this: You're working on the level design of a crucial section of your game and you've just spent hours perfecting the placement of every object and enemy. You git push your changes to GitHub, only to find out your next task is to resolve 20 merge conflicts. Yay! (/s). This is all too commonplace, yet unfortunately wastes valuable time that could have been spent building more levels, testing out the game loop with users, squashing bugs, and more.

Our aim with The Mirror's real-time collaboration is to break down these barriers. Imagine: everyone together is working together on a new level - artists, game developers, and alpha testers. In The Mirror, every script change, object placement, and variable update is instantly synchronized across all team members' screens. The level designer can see the artist's textures being applied in real-time, while the programmer can immediately test and iterate on gameplay mechanics. The seamless synchronization eliminates the need for constant file transfers and ensures that everyone is always working on the most up-to-date version of the project, similar to how Google Docs works. The feel when you're developing your game is (nearly) the same as the player's experience.

Gone are the days of manual pushes & pulls and version conflicts. In The Mirror, changes can be made and tested immediately, reducing your time spent on technical overhead and allowing for faster iterations. Artists can see how their assets look in the game world instantly, designers can test level layouts and make adjustments on the fly, and programmers can quickly prototype and refine gameplay systems. We want the development process to be as streamlined as possible, enabling you to work more efficiently with your team.

Furthermore, this enhances creativity: When team members and players see each other's updates in real-time, it sparks ideas and encourages experimentation without needing to run a full new build through CI/CD. The instant feedback loop and the ability to see changes immediately gets feedback to you more quickly, leading to more a high quality final release.

So what do we mean by "(real) real-time game dev"? We have massive respect for the technical aspects of the most popular engines today like Unity and Unreal/UEFN. You'll find "real-time" in their website titles, but the "real-time" experience we're pursuing is fundamentally different for The Mirror.

We still have many features to implement and bugs to squash, but we sincerely hope The Mirror creates a blissful game dev experience for you.

In case you missed it, The Mirror is entirely FOSS now (free and open source) so you can fully, 100% own your games via the permissive MIT license. We'd be honored for you to star The Mirror on GitHub if what we're building excites you.