OVERKILL'S PROFILE

Funny that you'd say that. Snowball came before both Molasses Meow and wuv, and was made for a contest game with not really much emphasis on being professional. At any rate, it won the contest, and I didn't really care too much about the flaws. I updated the game later to have a slightly better HUD, and less bugs, but that's about where I stopped.

The game was originally going to have switch puzzles that would require snowballs to land in a heated room to open doors, and also going to have water to build bridges over, and enemies and environments that would shoot fire. I meant to improve the snowball controls, but never really found something that worked, so I didn't bother wasting time. Ultimately, a lot more was planned than actually got accomplished, and I ran out of time. It's an unpolished, quickly-hashed together game. In fact, the levels that are there were made possibly a couple days before the deadline, hence only two of them.

I agree with MOST of the sentiments, and yeah this game is not that charming. It's simply something I managed to come up with in about 2 weeks of holiday time when I was still in high school. Contest games usually don't get a high level of thought invested into them, just whatever I can rush in really quickly.

Anyways, thanks for the review.

Yep! But it's not like I made or finished them all in one day :D

I have a soft spot for Verge, because it was the first good game engine I used and it taught me how to code when I was young. I use it when I want to pump out a quick cheap game or something, but not for anything particularly longterm.

ika's nice to script with (because of Python), but its editors need a lot of work and some of the core API is somewhat inflexible. You end up basically throwing away the builtin entity and map system if you're doing anything besides an RPG. So this sort of made me cringe a bit. That said, I agree Python makes things nice.

LuaVerge is the Verge engine in Lua code instead of VC, and I further went to the effort of making a library called "vx" which basically made a lot of Verge's stuff nicer to use (kind of like ika in a few ways). So you can actually design fairly nice games with this, but LuaVerge needs polish and it's got a few bottleneck things I haven't bothered to figure out.

I got frustrated with ika's and Verge's engine limitations, and decided to start coding my own engine from scratch.

I took a bunch of things I liked from ika and Verge and combined them. So "Brockoly", which I mentioned in my first post will hopefully improve on a bunch of engine lackings.

Similar to ika, it's got both software images (Images -- made with my own custom graphics code from the bottom up) and hardware images (Textures -- using OpenGL). But unlike ika, all the textures have a software image that can be drawn onto and refreshed and manipulated in a bunch of ways. Both software and hardware images have alpha, multiple blend modes, region-grabbing, and rotation and scaling that can be applied. There are both software and hardware primitives for drawing rectangles/lines/circles so this could be handy.

Brockoly uses a fairly flexible sound library, based on top of FMOD Ex. It also has keyboard input, eventually I want to put in joystick and mouse support.

Brockoly also introduces a builtin frame throttler that can be plugged in and be used by games. Timing is something lots of people mess up, so having at as part of the core engine ensures that the games will have a rather similar framerate across platforms and computer specs.

So graphics, audio, basic input, and timings's all there. So it's on to the trickier stuff, the stuff that that makes game design easier.

I'm at the design hurdle of making file formats that the engine will use (followed by making my own editors, I think). I've started the Sprite system, but I'm trying to keep the engine sprites fairly lightweight and easily extensible.

It's my hope that sprites are merely containers of image frames and animations. And extensions (maybe not in the inheritance sense) to sprites are what determine if this is an "RPG Sprite" or "Platformer Sprite" or whatever.

Of all the formats I need to come up with, sprites is the easiest. Tilesets being the next easiest. Maps (which are arrangements of sprites and tiles), and worlds (which are arrangements of maps connected together) are slightly more difficult.

School lately has been stomping on my free time so this going a little slower than I wanted.

But the hope is I'll make a game engine to conquer the currently used ones!

... And then make games.