Baby Steps

Hi world,

I’ve finally squeezed an update of sorts out of my awesome schedule.
Things are chugging along nicely under the hood, although there isn’t a pile of concrete things to show. Building an engine from scratch + a full-time job = death on wheels… but things are up and running, brothers–

Right at the moment, we basically have a simple app that loads a single sprite and animates it as you move it around the screen. Talk about baby steps, huh? Things aren’t all that interesting to look at yet, but at least you get a picture of me looking awesome making things happen in my office up there. Pretty much all of the parameters involved in this are read in from a file, so you can play with the animation speed and switch sprites in and our. There’s a lot more going on under the hood and a lot of the core is in there, but for now, this is what we’ve got actually running. For this project, having something entirely original is important to me, thus the (perhaps selfish) choice to build an entirely new and reusable engine from scratch.

So, more concretely, what is done?

Well…

• a general lightweight 2D engine with more of the elements in place at least as stubs
• a general entity system for each game state to manage all of the in-game objects
• an entire DirectX based input system and key mapping system for configurable control settings
• a reasonably robust logger to make debugging less taxing
• a multi-format file parser for configuration and other files
• a sprite and animation engine to handle animation of all in-game objects
• an overall design that is worked to be extensible and useable on future projects, if we go that route
• some other stuff less worthy of mention

My two main goals currently are building the skeleton and groundwork for the whole system in a way that makes sense and isn’t going to require significant rework later (at least, I hope), and to get Tucker something to move sprites around in and get a general feel of how his animations and backgrounds work together. Things aren’t all that exciting yet, but look forward to some prettier updates with actual videos and stuff as we get this beast going.