I recently decided to, once again, bury the game project I’ve been working on. There were several reasons for doing so. The biggest is that D has reached a state where not only is it ready for production code, it blows other languages out of the water. So I’ve scrapped the thousands of lines of C I had lying around (well, not actually scrapped, just archived), stopped accepting contract work (which has really slowed my game development down) and am now focusing (mostly) full time on game development with D.
My first project is a game library I’m calling Smoothie. You can read more about it on my D blog. Essentially, in its early stages it is a 2D game library derived from the excellent Slick library by Kevin Glass. It’s not a direct port of Slick to D, nor does it closely follow Slick’s design. I’m taking it in quite a different direction, though there are some similarities. For example, my Renderer class right now is a direct port of a portion of Slick’s Graphics class. I adopted the GameContainer concept, but aside from the name its implementation is quite a bit different. Ultimately, Smoothie will grow beyond just being a 2D library. I have big plans for it.
My goal is not just to make a game library, though. I’m here to make games. So once I get the first couple of point releases of Smoothie ready, I’ll be using it to develop a couple of games. The initial design decisions are being made to that end. And since I’m finished with that tedious contract work that consumed so much time and back to doing what I love, I can make more time to blog about game development.
As part of the process, I’ve decided to start keeping a devlog of the progress I make with Smoothie and the games I create with it. Rather than start an entirely new blog, I’ve simply added a new ‘Devlog’ category to this one. I’ve really neglected this blog for the past few months, so this will help breathe some life back into it. Hopefully, it will also turn more people on to D. I like it that the D community is fairly small right now. It has a special feeling that other communities lack. But even so, I hope to see the language succeed at large.
In my next devlog entry, I’ll describe my development environment. Setting up an environment is an issue newcomers to D usually need to sort out on their own, given the lack of full-featured D IDEs, or other tools, at the moment.
Technorati Tags: Devlog, D Programming Language, Smoothie, Slick, game programming, game development
{ 3 } Comments
Sounds exactly like ArcLib, except ArcLib will not have 3D support because that would defeat the purpose of a 2D game library.
Maybe we can team up and work on making one very good 2d library suite. I will eventually get around to tile mapping code and other semi-generic game specific features as well. The goals for my library also align up with yours as well. The only thing I lack for my library is time and manpower, but I’d say with my limited resources I’ve managed to already meet about 45% of the features smoothie would have.
Of course, if you don’t that is fine as well, just some friendly competition.
Good luck.
Sounds exactly like ArcLib, except ArcLib will not have 3D support because that would defeat the purpose of a 2D game library.
I don’t see it that way. I think they can complement each other quite well. Having support for a full 2D game engine from within a 3D game, and vice versa, allows for some cool interactions. To see this sort of thing in practice, you can look at what people are doing with Torque Game Builder and the Torque Game Engine from GarageGames.
The goals for my library also align up with yours as well. The only thing I lack for my library is time and manpower, but I’d say with my limited resources I’ve managed to already meet about 45% of the features smoothie would have.
All 2D libraries are going to share similar functionality. The big difference comes in the interface. I’m not out to compete with anybody, I just want to stretch my D legs with a useful project. Once I get it into a usable state, I’ll be happy to compare notes with you and see what comes of it.
Alright alright
Have fun, 2D rocks!
I expect to share ideas. Don’t be too offended by my competitiveness. . .
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