The Lenzmaker Project
Overview
Lenzmaker Project is a Game Engine geared toward creating vast open game worlds with procedural content.
Platforms: Cross platform (Windows, Linux, Android – Working on it. 🙂 )
Written with: C/C++, OpenGL/GLSL, wxWidgets, DirectSound, OpenAL, Python
Architectural pattern: Interface-based programming.
API Documentation: http://lenzmaker.com/
The beginning
Somewhere around year 2007, I embarked the journey for a game project, the development plan included both game as well as the game engine. Using a third party engine was not in my plan as most of the commercial engines were not affordable for me during that time. The free and the open source ones were good, since they are open source I had no idea when the authors of these frameworks discontinues their work. Some of these Engines comes up with GPL license, integrating which may attract trouble at the time we bring it into the market as a commercial product. Other than this legal stuff, what motivated me to write a game engine from the scratch is that the freedom it gives us to customize the source code according to the needs. Almost all the commercial game engine’s are general purpose frameworks geared towards creating all genre of games. Having control over the whole thing let us specifically customize the required features at the fundamental level to create some stuff, possibly an out of the box stuff like Minecraft or No Man’s Sky. But writing things from scratch seems hard, time consuming, still its a thrilling experience. However, adopting a 3rd party engine is an ideal choice when there is a tight “Time to market” constraints. During the development phase, there were many situations I felt like quitting. Once I quit and completely disconnected from it. Later, there were some wake up calls, and it put myself back on track. If you wish to know the development effort required for writing your own game engine, then have a look at these posts on Quora and get demotivated 🙂
- How hard is to build a game engine?
- When is it a good idea to build your own game engine?
- How do I build a game engine?
- How do I build a game engine from scratch?
There are people exists on earth who is aware of hardships of climbing mount Everest, still they find joy in accomplishing it.