I have been dabbling in game development as a hobby for a while now, and I cannot seam to quite get my games to sparkle at least a bit with some graphics. I have decided to write a simple test game engine that only focuses on the representation of graphics – shapes, textures and surfaces.
While I have a few very simple game engines designed for my own games under my belt, I want to create a game engine that I can use to display and play with graphics. I’m going to do this in C++. Since this is my first time with a major engine, the engine in not going to focus on 3D graphics, it’s going to be a mixture of isometric and 2D graphics.
My previous engines have incorporated (been able to draw) or focused on simple flat (almost 2D) non impressive graphic designs and representations of:
- the player
- NPCs
- objects
- walls and surfaces
- textures
Also, I had some basic AI and sometimes even sound.
They also saved and loaded games.
They didn’t have a map editor or a level editor. Is this going to be a problem in the future? At this time I have to point out that some of my games didn’t get finished because I was to lazy to write the few last levels.
My question at this point would be: What are some things one should know if one wants to write (develope) a better graphical game engine with all it’s functions.
I’d grab the source that has been released by various game houses (Quake engine etc) and go from there.
Learning from existing greatness is a good way to get your head around things you don’t know yet, especially those things that you don’t even know you don’t know.