Ok, so I ended up writing my own game engine based on top of XNA, and I am just wondering what else I need to make a complete engine.
This is what’s in the engine:
- Physics (Farseer Physics)
- Particle Engine (Mercury Project)
- 2D Cameras
- Input Handling
- Screen Management (Menus, Pause Screen, etc.)
- Sprite ( Animation, Sprite Sheets)
- And XNA stuff like Sound.
Am I missing anything that might be crucial to a game engine?
A theme or market for your engine. If you’re doing anything beyond basic your basic graphics engine, you’ll want to concentrate on a market for your engine, like RPG, strategy, puzzle, platformer, action, or FPS (ok, not FPS).
This will help you point yourself in the direction you need to go in order to make further enhancements to the engine without asking us. An engine like say, the Unreal Engine, can do multiple things, but what it tends to do best is what it’s made for, FPS games. Likewise, you should tailor your engine so that it suits a particular field of interest, and therefore is picked up for that type of gameplay.
You can make it general to a point, but realize the more generalized your engine is, the harder it is to program, both time wise and skill wise. Other programmers are also less likely to pick up a general engine (unless that’s all there is) if a more specific platform is available. Or to just write their own since modifying a generalized engine is about as hard as creating your own.