Thursday, October 24, 2013

Unnamed 2D game engine

It has been so long since my last post, partly due to the fact that I have a very boring/tedious day job. It's hardly any excuse though, because everyone has weekends and tons of free time after work. So immediately after participation in GGJ 2013@UC Santa Cruz with our game (done in Unity) voted as the best, I did a lot of research on the existing 2D game engines only to be frustrated. Unity3D only handles 2D sprites well when you buy the 2D Toolkit, which I did. Even so, it just doesn't quite fit into the Unity pipeline, because what you see is usually not what you get. On top of that, the text system is even more frustrating. The problem with Unity3D is that, even though the learning curve is pretty flat in the beginning, you need to buy lots of modules from their asset store(that's how they make money). Since building a 2D game engine is relatively easy (compared to 3D), and I'm too picky about APIs(flixel, cocos2d...etc.), I started building everything from scratch in OpenGL ES. After just a few months, I'm making a lot of progress, given how little time I have spent on it:


It's a difficult decision to make whether I should prioritize the cross-platform capability and port the code base to Android, or instead develop a complete toolchain plus the scripting engine, with both being quite important. But for now I'm just going to enjoy game development with my own API, which many people don't have the luxury of.