Toasty - An Introduction

I have started working on a simple to use C++ game engine with accompanying editor using an outboard component based system as it's base. I will be using this blog to chronicle my progress.

I started this project because of several reasons and these reasons are of course my own opinion.

Reason #1

There was no easy to use cross platform free to use C++ game engine. This is a small reason and is debateable, but that is how felt and still feel although Polycode is pretty good nowadays.

Reason #2

There was no game editor that allowed an ease of creating 2D and 3D games. Although this recently changed with Unity 4.3 Beta.

Reason #3

There was no game editor that had real-time multi-user game editing. This is actually the biggest reason, I had just finished setting up an internal build server and git server for Bifrost Studios which used Unity3D, doing this made me realise how bad it was to work with more than one user at a time so I endeavoured to start this project. (I never tested with the Asset Server module).

Reason #4

No game editor that incorporated game design and project management into the editor itself.

When writing a design document one should be able to extract task information from it. I plan on having a way to write a design doc that more matches a game ( I think a wiki matches a game design better than a page by page document, but I have a few different ideas). Following that I want a way for the tasks to be auto-generated (Obviously with ability to manually do it) and allowing an admin or project manager to assign tasks to users keeping a To-Do list. Because tasks are generated I hope to also be able to auto-generate some prefabs using auto-generated placeholder graphics (Cubes\ squares \ circles etc) so that scripters can start testing scripts while the artists work in place with the mesh.

Reason #5

Doing this project will improve my C++ knowledge and development ability in general outside of work.


I am not sure how well this will do, or even if I will complete it but for now it is something I am going to slowly work on during my free-time.