2010 Roadmap

Ok, so I've decided that if I'm going to make some serious progress with this engine then I need some sort of roadmap with milestones to try and hit, otherwise it'll never happen.

I've decided to focus on the 2D aspects of the engine initially and then build up into 3d from there.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the development of the engine is going to be game driven. I'm working on the basic framework of the 2d rendering engine, which will basically be an abstraction of the layering, batching and culling of the various sprites that make up a scene. I also need to work out the interaction with shader based effects.

So, the roadmap. I'll start short term. This week I'm still on holiday, so I should be able to get the whole of PacMan completed this week. This will include a first draft of the 2d rendered, and possibly a base Ai class as part of the engine.

After that I'll be back at work, but I'll be able to move onto my last clone, Mario. That will involve an expansion of the Tile editor that I've made for PacMan to include parallax backgrounds/ foregrounds, and collision surfaces (ledges) to allow for more complex levels. I also want to refactor the editor into the engine code, and work on a way of allowing the designer to 'plug in' gameplay code and then run the game within the editor, to allow for quick testing of levels.

I'm currently envisaging Mario (and the supporting work on the editor) taking up the whole of August.

In the longer term, I want to have my team's first original game ready for playtest by Christmas.

We have 3 different concepts that we're toying with. I don't want to talk about them too much at the moment, but we have one arcade type game, one room based platformer/ puzzler, and one 2d scroller/ platformer shooter. The first requires basically zero graphics assets, but seems to be the least likely be successful, the middle concept requires the most in the way of artwork, and may be out of our reach at the moment, but equally is the most refined of the concepts. The third will probably have the broadest appeal, will need some, but not too much in the way of artwork, but is the least well fleshed out of the three.

I might say more once we've decided on which to go with, and once development is in process.

Anyway, that's a bit of a rough, rambling roadmap for the remainder of 2010. Hopefully by the end of the year the Alta engine will be in a state where it can comfortably provide the functionality for most 2D games we want to develop...