Holy cr*p! It’s been like 40 days since I have posted anything! That’s probably the longest the blog has gone silent. Well, that’s partly because I have been working on a new game and yes a new game engine. The new game will not be a 3D game but a 2D game. No, I haven’t abandoned the O2 game engine, to the contrary the O2 Game engine has had quite a few updates to it. So why another game engine?

Long long ago (, maybe not far far away) when I was designing/prototyping the O2 engine, I had plans for it to be a 2D and a 3D game engine. Overambitious? Yeah, maybe. But tell me who hasn’t had overambitious design plans?  Anyway, during that time a lot of design went into the 2D part. I even went ahead and created a mock prototype of 2D game builder UI. In any case, that was soon put on the back burner since we started in earnest on the 3D game. The design however, lingered in the archives, until I had the time to revisit it after the Doofus game was completed. Instead of letting the design rot, I decided to peruse and finish the 2D part.

A couple of problems immediately arose when I had a re-looked. The O2 engine is designed to be a 3D engine and a lot of abstraction has been made to ensure that the engine does 3D properly and efficiently. That’s not really required for 2D. 2D is a lot less complicated than 3D and most of the sections of the 3D game engine felt over-engineered when considered in the context of 2D. Most of the book-keeping required for 3D is down right unnecessary for 2D. In the end the two designs were a significant overlap, so I decided to rehash the 2D concept using similar design but start over from the engine core. Basically meaning, a rewrite of a significant section of the game engine code.  To my surprise the process was completed far sooner than anticipated, and that too without significant regressions. Yes the new engine uses a lot of same code-base as the O2 engine, but the engine itself is very different from the 3D engine.

Next came the game. There was an old prototyped 2D game (more details soon) that was lying with me for ages. Most of the game was polished up and ported to the new engine (lesson: Never throw away your old experimental code; ever. 😀 ),  and that’s about it. I am pretty happy with the results of my 2D experiment thus far. Completing a game is a complicated process. It requires a lot of things to come together and work correctly. True, 2D is lot easier than 3D, but there is still work to be done finishing the game and I hate to give out a release date just yet (, because of the fear of being proved abjectly wrong yet again 😀 ) .