osu!lazer

Osu! is a free rhythm game that I often play and keep up with. Developed by Dean “peppy” Herbert, it was released in 2007 and was heavily inspired by a 2005 Japanese rhythm game known as Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. The game, even to today, is not very popular compared to what is considered the “mainstream” for video games; but the players and fans of it are truly dedicated and supporting. Since its release, peppy sought to improve, fix, and maintain the game but that became increasingly difficult with how old and jumbled the code for the game was; and thus, he decided to work from the ground up. In 2015, he began the development of an osu! 2.0 which soon became known as “osu!lazer.” 

I chose to cover this game because the development is public, its updates are being covered on their youtube channel, and I enjoy the game and its community. While watching this video (a bunch of lazer updates), I noticed that a well known player known as -GN made a pull request. It was at this point in which I realized that they’ve been working on GitHub and that what they do is basically what I’ve been learning but in a real-world application. 

I thought that now that I was a little more familiar with GitHub and the process of development, I could check out what was happening with osu!lazer. I went to their repository page (https://github.com/ppy/osu/releases) and simply looked around. The most notable things about the repo would be the number of issues and pull requests. 1,000 active issues is already quite the number but over 25,000 issues over the course of this project seems simply insane. This may just be due to my lack of knowledge and experience as this is a relatively small team and project but those numbers could be even bigger with much larger games and their possibly massive development teams. 

Exploring the repo made me realize how complicated software development, game development, or any other kind of development can be, at least with my current knowledge and experience. For example, there are lots of tags used for issues and pull requests, areas of the game, priority, and size are just some of the categories that the team has decided to divide the development into. I realized that how the game is developed, in the coding, more technical, and specific aspects is still quite foreign to me. Despite having taken computer science classes for many years and creating code in those classes, this level of programming seems so far away. I hope to be able to get to this level and possibly even contribute to osu!lazer, but I occasionally find myself questioning if I’ll really be able to code at this level.