Looks like I am going to have some time to do my own thing, finally. Maybe it is a good time to retake some old forgotten projects. For a very long time, I’ve wanted to make videogames. Not just as a hobby, but as a profession. I’m a huge fan of indie games as you can see from my Steam library here. Now with SteamOS and smatphone games it seems like there’s a lot of changes in the videogame industry. You don’t need to have a team of 100+ people working together to create the next hit game, it just seems like game development is going back to its roots, where people created little gems, on their own, with a lot of talent and tons of imagination.
Now, I’m a hardcore techie, so I’m not going to be using any popular engines like Unity or Ogre. I did contribute to Leadwerks being ported to Linux on Kickstarter, but I don’t think I’ll be using it.
I don’t intend on reinventing the wheel though, so I will be using a great number of open source libraries. This is a list of technologies that I might probably be using :
- C/C++
- Lua, for scripting purposes
- Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), by the great icculus, the cross-platform equivalent of DirectX, handles images, audio, net, …
- OpenGL, the cross-platform of Direct3D
- OpenAL, the audio equivalent to OpenGL
- Assimp, the Asset Import Library, a library used to import 3D models, bones and animations
- Audacity, audio editor
- zlib, probably, for compression purposes
- Boost, because it just rocks
- LMMS, to produce music. I’m actually going to give this a shot! Needless to say, I have no idea what i’m doing.
- Blender, 3D model creation
- Makehuman, quick and easy character creation
- Git, version control
- CMake, the most flexible build system I can think of
- Valgrind, the analysis tools that have taught me so much about programming
- GCC/GDB the GNU compiler and debugger
Other than this, I will give a shot to LLVM, as I keep hearing more and more about it, but I’ve never actually tried it. And I have no idea what I could use for creating sound effects.
Eventually, I might write a second part to this post, where I will aacknowledge how wrong I was about many choices I make here. There is one thing I know for sure though, and it’s that, at the very least, I will get more knowledge from this experience.