Zen :: Studio

Zen Studio is a integrated development environment shell.

If you're creating development tools, whether they're for games or for enterprise applications, Zen Studio is a fantastic place to start. Zen Studio provides a solid platform, allowing you to concentrate on developing your tools without having to worry about any of common features found in a development environment.

Zen Studio gives you the option of distributing your tools as a standalone application, or as a complete integrated solution.

Zen Studio uses the the Zen Core Plugin system and integrates with the Zen Core scripting framework, providing you with a solid, stable, extensible platform.

Getting Started

This getting started guide is for end-users, not application developers. TR - I'll work on adding documentation for application developers later... sorry :P

Creating a Workspace

The current version of Zen Studio does not create a workspace yet, but we've included a template workspace. If you used the default install directory, you can find it here:

C:\IndieZen\workbench.template

Copy this folder to a new location. For example, copy it to C:\IndieZen\mygame or something like that.

Opening the Workspace with Zen Studio

Then start Zen Studio using the icon in your Windows Start menu. This will give you a dialog that is asking for a workspace location. Enter the directory you copied the template (C:\IndieZen\mygame in this example).

Your first Project

Next, click on the menu File, New Project. This will open the Project Wizard.

Select "Game Project".

This will pop up a dialog asking you to name the project. Enter whatever name you like, but be sure the name matches file system rules (letters, numbers and spaces are allowed).

Playing with Game Builder

Next, right click on the "Game Object Types" folder. and click on "New Object Type". This will create a new game object type.

You can right-click it and click "Rename" to rename it to a new type. I named mine "Object" since it's the root object.

Next, right click on it and click "Add Child". This will add a child game object type.

Child game object types inherit all of the properites of the parent game object type.

To see this in action, open both of the types by right clicking on the types in the project explorer and click "Edit".

Now you have two tabs side by side and you can click on each of them and see the empty game object types (GOT).

If you want to see both simultaneously, drag one of the tabs and tear it off to another location. I dragged mine down below. You know when it's a valid "drop" point when you see a blue highlite.

Next, in the parent (Object), you will see a row of headers. Right click anywhere on those headers and select "Insert Element".

This will insert a new element in the Object type. Click inside of the "Element Name" column of that newly added row and enter "objectId" and press tab or Enter.

Notice how the "NewObjectType" now also has an objectId, except it's in italics. This means it inherits that property from the "Object" type and you cannot change the name or the type, but you can change the default value.

... that's enough to kinda get started for now. Sorry the docs aren't better, but I'll continue working on them over the next few days.