Starting a new Game Engine
Who am I?
Hello there! As I am writing this I am a programmer in year 1 of university with a bit of too much hope for this project. I have used in the past Unity3D and made quite a few games with it, but other then that I am just learning how to use C++ to build games without an engine.
Why grand strategy?
I have always wanted to offer open source tools to my fellow game developers. One such tool is a game engine in the grand strategy scene, one that is still relatively niche to the other bigger genres. I have decided that this will be my long term project which I will never manage to complete on my own, especially when I am against a studio as big as paradox games which is the major player in the grand strategy genre with the Clausewitz engine. Below you can see how one map of such a game looks like, of course the map is bigger then this, and it does not have to look like Earth. Anyway, world divided into polygons basically.
Developing an engine organically
What I plan to do is not to make an engine from scratch with all the possible features, because that would be a mess and I would code to expectations instead of reality. Making a few games (grand strategy) seems much more interesting and enjoyable for me. The code used would be repurposed into an engine over time which of course is going to be open source. I decided that the engine is going to be build using C++, mainly because I don’t have time besides what I do at university to learn another language at the same level of proficiency and yeah, C++ is also one of the most popular programming languages in the games industry. I am also quite hopeful that modern C++ is more like other newer and enjoyable languages like Rust or Odin.
I will try to distance myself from OOP design as much as possible for obvious reasons, maybe I will try a more data oriented design We will see… and time will tell.
I already made a repository for the project on github which you can find here.
Time and iteration are the best way to develop something as complicated as a game engine, so I will need game designers, fellow programmers and artists that would partake in this lofty endeavor.
For our first game I would like to make finish it into about 1 month (not starting at the time I post this) with the modest scope of making a simple war game. The mechanics would consist of:
- Managing supply lines
- Army recruitment
- Fighting system
Yep, that’s it cya next time!