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Fallen Game Engine May 11, 2011

Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , add a comment

This entry will likely only be of much interest to other game developers. I’ll try to put up more fun game stuff soon.

A couple of months ago, I decided that I was going to write my next game to target Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, instead of the Xbox Indie Marketplace. There are alot of reasons for this, and I can go into them in depth if anyone cares, but the gist is that I want more control.

Going forward with that decision, I started looking into the game engines/frameworks available that would match my needs. (If you follow my twitter, you’ve probably seen that I’ve ported the Demina player about a half dozen times. I used it as a gauge to test the frameworks.) There’s alot of really cool stuff out there.

In the end, I realized that what I really want is XNA. I really love the framework, and it matches perfectly with how I want to write games. Unfortunately it has two problems. It doesn’t exist outside of Windows/XBLIG, and I really dislike requiring the user to install both .Net and XNA before they can install my game on Windows. There are partial ports to Mono, which could help solve the problems, but they don’t seem very well supported. So I decided to create something of my own.

It’s taken me a couple of weeks, but I’ve reached the end of my todo list, and now the Fallen Game Engine is up and running. (It’s really just a framework, not an engine. I chose the name poorly.) It’s not a port of XNA, but I’ve implemented the features that I need in a way that is very similar to the features in XNA. I’m sticking to the rule of “Write Games, Not Engines”, so now that I’ve implemented the specific features I know I’ll need, I’m going to start on game code rather than spend forever implementing features I may never use.

The code is open source, and the reason I’m posting this is to invite other developers who may be interested to take a look. I think it would be of particular interest to XNA developers who are wanting to port over to Mac OS X or Linux. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to go take a look at the source, and I’ll happily help you get setup and working.