Pickles!

Most recently I've been tinkering out with the idea of doing a few 8-bit-ish games. I took a while to look around for 2D engine to use for such a project, but I did not find one that I particularly liked. The XNA Game Studio is fantastic, but sadly it's limited to Microsoft platforms, and I would really like a cross-platform engine. More specifically I'd like a C/C++ cross-platform 2D engine, as those are my languages of choice.

Instead of settling for something I would not be happy with I opted out for designing my own engine. The engine is currently in a good shape, and performs quite well. I continue to develop it, as I play around with game ideas and discover requirements for my engine.

More after the break...

The engine is currently split into two parts, the PickleOS, and Pickle2D.

PickleOS is a system dependent static library which wraps a number of system functions such as creating a window for the game, retrieving user input, threading apis, timing apis, and more.

Pickle2D is a system independent static library which implements various drawing and resource handling functions all implemented using OpenGL (the OpenGL libraries are statically linked into PickleOS as well), and standard C/C++ libraries.

A system independent game implementation would then statically link these two libraries, and do it's thing! As of this moment PickleOS only compiled under Windows, I will start porting it to OSX and maybe Linux once I have a game project near completion.

Currently I'm playing around with a little game called Under, a 2D platformer with a dynamic world, that was inspired by Minecraft. It's very early in it's design, but it's been fun, and it's proving to be a good way of testing the engine.