Me and My Engine

Note: When this article was written, the engine was named Stardust rather than Uranus. I've since changed it to avoid name collisions.

So, a bit of self-introduction; I'm tecanec. I'm currently 17 years old and have programmed since I was about 11/12 years old. I was discovered to have autism around age 6, but I've learnt to handle the struggles that that imposes, and I still have its creative benefits! Yay! I like playing Splatoon and doing nerdy stuff like programming.

But that's not why we're here. We are here to talk about my all-new Stardust Game Engine! Its creation is inspired by a discussion I've had at a game jam. I, personally, don't really enjoy using Game Maker Studio, because I find it a bit lacking in features. And while it's definitely possible to implement alternatives and workarounds for some of those features, it still doesn't feel right, and the techniques used to do this often leads to spaghetti. That's why I prefer Unity or even a custom engine. However, my teammate, while agreeing to the point I made, found that he most enjoyed the Game Maker workflow. And I agree. Having different enemies and obstacles be separate assets feels way more natural than what Unity does. Plus, C# is a bit too rigid for my liking. If only we could have an engine that allowed for the best of both worlds...

This inspired me to begin development of a new engine. I decided to use Lua as a scripting language, since it's one of my favorite programming languages. It's designed with embedding in mind, which is great. The internals are written in C++ and I use SFML for interacting with the OS and hardware. 

The goals I have decided for include making the engine as flexible as possible, so that game developers can use whatever workflow they want to. Lua handles a lot of this, but this still means that the API has to be very direct. My second goal is to avoid overwhelming the user, which is in strong contrast to the first point. However, by maintaining patterns in the API's design, this should be rather achievable.

I've been working on this engine for the past couple of weeks, and I hope it'll become a useful tool for game development in the future. I'll try to keep this log updated while I develop the engine, so please stay tuned! 

- tecanec