Slowly creating a game engine.

I have to admit I am quite enjoying SDL at the moment. About 10 years ago I used it a little bit and found it to be a bit low level for what I was looking for. Sure it was very cross platform but I was looking for something slightly higher level to knock out a few prototypes. I think I ended up using python and pygame (which uses SDL internally).

Fast forward to now and with increased experience in C++ plus SDL having improved somewhat as well I still find it low level but am finding it fairly easy to wrap it into a slightly higher level api to use.

It means so far this year I have been writing a game engine, I actually want to be writing a game rather than an engine. Game engines can and will steal your time in part because they are so interesting to create and in part because there is always something else to add.

Thankfully I have avoided abstracting away SDL. The code I write is tightly coupled to SDL but then SDL is on every possible platform I can reasonably target making this is an acceptable trade off. No point abstracting things that don't need abstracting. I think of the code I am writing as building on top of SDL to implement things I will need or using C++ to remove manual work from the C api that SDL provides.

Again the risk here is building what I don't need, that preys on my mind. The sooner I start to write an actual game the better which leads me onto another problem. I can't quite decide on what game to create. I know it will be a throw away game just to get the test out the engine but thinking of a simple game seems to have stumped me. Designers block or something? 

Anyway tonight I plan to make a list of features the engine should have before I start to work on a game. I will make sure the list is quite short and that alone will force me to come up with a game idea.