I was a bit hush hush about my current activities, but I guess it’s OK to talk about it now that the project has been put on track. I am not revealing too many details as yet, but I can tell you what it is going to be. Well it’s actually a smaller project considering the my previous one (Doofus Longears – The game), lot easier in complexity and pretty small in size. Yes, it is related to games and gaming and involves a game, but it’s not a 3D project — it is 2D. Well it is 3D under the hood since it is based on Direct3D but it rarely uses the third dimension so it’s not 3D per say. The entire project involves creation of a game, which I must say is pretty trivial, but more than that it involves the creation of a generic game builder software, the work for which is already under way. The name of the entire thing is still under wraps, but you should see it come out in later entries.

The engine is an already written, accomplished 2D engine — no I am not writing the engine this time. The major job is to create an elaborate game builder (GUI), a designer, a scripting engine (Lua in this case) on top of the engine and integration of the engine and the scripting system into the game builder and designer. The game will be built on top of the scripting engine and should be pretty simple to make once the game builder and the scripting systems are in place and properly integrated. The game builder is designed to be generic enough to make any kind of 2D game (arcade, adventure, platformer, puzzle,…)

So — Yes, I am taking a holiday from our engine for a while, I hope only for a little while. I have been up to some interesting R&D which I hope I can integrated into the O2 Engine soon. It’s been a long time since I worked on a 2D game, almost 7 years now since I wrote a 2D pacman clone. The game had 3 levels and crappy graphics, makes me laugh looking at it now. But hey — that’s how you learn.

As it stands today, a fair amount of  progress has been made on the GUI side of things. A lot still remains to be done with integration, but 2D games are lot simpler than 3D ones so I hope and can tide over this project pretty soon. More details about the project and the game builder will be out in due course. I will post some screens of game builder when the game engine is integrated and there is at least a semblance of a game running inside it.