Its actually taken me some time to decided what the focus of my engine was going to be, first I had to make some decisions such as whether it would be 3d, 2d, 2.5d, then after that I’ve had to start thinking about a specific style of game to target the engine towards whether it be an FPS, RTS and so on. Another thing that might also affect and make the development easier is focusing on a specific genre of game and bending the engine to suit it’s needs. This is especially important as i pan side by side with the engine development to produce a simple game to test the functionality of the engine, this is opposed to creating several small sample applications to sample different areas of the engine.
I decided to focus my engine towards 3d graphics in the end for several reasons.
- I’ve looked into 2.5d in the past and as great as some of the engines look that I’ve checked out, It’s just not for me I would rather focus my efforts of either something 3d or 2d. Here’s an intresting example of an engine someone made on top of the XNA framework http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww.
- I feel there’s a lot more I could do with 3d than 2d, There’s quite a few things I’m interested in attempting to implement in my engine. I’ve be composing a list of potential features at a later point.
- I like the added level of complexity involved.
As far the genre of game is involved my 2 preferred genres are adventure and horror, must probably for a common core characteristic between adventure and horror games is that they tend to have really good well written story lines and very fun to play. I’m probably going to take the horror route as its definitely my favorite genre of games. Some of my favorite games include all the Resident Evils created before 4, although the new ones are fun to play the whole feel of the game has changed and they don’t feel anywhere near as eerie as the older ones, Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness And Amnesia – The dark decent. It would be good if I could find a middle ground between some of these games.
quite obviously I’m going to have to now come up with an idea for a simple game that can be built on the engine side by side, I obviously want to keep it simple otherwise It’ll really slow down the development process. I’ll be producing game designs as a later stage, It’s a bit early in development to start thinking about really, first I need to get the core engine designed and implemented I will be keeping it at mind though.
This is far from my finalized, I may change my mind later on, I’m going to spend a lot of time just looking at the feasibility of what I’m trying to accomplish.