Leadwerks – A Great Indie Engine
Last year I decided I’d bite the bullet and learn C++ with the end-goal of being able to finally design and build my own applications and games. So I went and got the fantastic C++ video tutorial library from 3D Buzz, which I strongly recommend any new C++ video game developer go through – They take you right form start to finish. All the way from an ASCII rogue-like game to a sprite-based game. Furthermore, its all designed in pretty OO.
As I began the 6th and last series of the 3D Buzz tutorials – Creating a 3D OpenGL engine – I decided I’d like to focus less on the core mathematics of displaying pixels and more on the creation and design of actual games. I’m not a very good mathematician after-all, and getting into that kind of stuff requires low-level efficient code. Code I really don’t have the skill to write just yet.
So I started looking around for graphics engine libraries that’ll allow me to focus on the game itself. There are a startlingly huge number of graphics engines out there, both free and not, and while I went through quite a damn few I want to talk about just one.