It's a blog for my engine!

I want to program. I want to work on Language Arcade and I want to build it with my Chalo engine. There are also other games I want to make but I just don't want to spend the time rewriting code I've done before for all the basics. And I don't want to use a proprietary engine. And I also get the most enjoyment out of programming when I am designing, problem solving, and implementing all this stuff myself. I'm more of a framework maker than a game developer, really.

My first really fleshed out engine was Kuko, built in C++ and SDL and Lua back in 2016. I wrote Fin 'n' Kit with it. But, there are certain things about SDL that just aren't a lot of fun, since it's built on C instead of C++. SFML has a lot more "quality of life" features that C++ provides. I found it hard to go back to Kuko after an extended break from it.

I began working on Chalo in 2019 when I began working on Lenxion: The Cursed Castle in late 2019, intending to make a Patreon thing - I had just quit yet another software development job and I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to find a full time job that didn't make me want to implode. I went back to my job adjunct-teaching at my community college (which I did from the beginning of 2016 until the end of 2018) and got an opportunity to interview for a full-time position (even though I don't have a masters degree) and got hired! So, financially, I'm fine. I didn't keep the Patreon up as things began shutting down in 2020 because other artists needed that money more; I didn't feel right asking people to give me money when I can get by and have a good job now.

Most of the features from Kuko are in Chalo, but not built around Lua. I do like Lua, but I want the fewest amount of libraries not-by-me in my game engine. If I add a scripting system, maybe I'll put Lua in. I don't know. I'm not to that point yet. But, besides some rough patches I need to re-design, working in Chalo has been a lot of fun. I got a version of Vamoose up and running relatively quickly with it.

I just want to add some more features to the engine (and continue developing the "game template" project) so that, when I have a new project I want to work on, I just create a copy of the template project and hit the ground running. This mostly means implementing the really common things - basic game objects (movement, animation, physics), some sort of event system I guess, and probably refining the map editor I had been working on for Lenxion.

Actually, if I work on tools like the map editor or a menu builder, I might end up using wxWidgets to build those tools. It will give me a reason to finally learn a UI framework for C++, and maybe enable some non-game projects for the future. We'll see.