eriktate / figment

A small game engine written in zig

figment

A simple, small, "from scratch" game engine for making the types of games I want to make

Why?

I'm a programmer, I like to understand how things work, and I think "engine-level" problems are really fun to work on. It would probably be smarter to use something like Godot or Unity, but those suck the fun out of creating for me. I also think I can probably create a more efficient engine for the specific games I want to make without the baggage of building something completely general purpose

What types of games?

Mostly 2D, often pixel art, tile-based games. A lot of my ideas end up being sidescrolling platformers, but top down games as well. And who knows, maybe one day something that doesn't quite fit "traditional" 2D games

How do you choose what to write from scratch?

Basically anything I'm interested in doing myself. For example, I'm not (yet) interested in:

• Windowing/input
• Playing sound/music
• Rasterizing fonts
• Loading PNGs
• OpenGL function loading

This list might grow as I realize I need access to more things, but all of the submodules in the vendor/ folder solve problems I'm not interested in tackling

Is this an actual engine?

Depends on your definition. My current plan is to have some core libraries and systems that get re-used across all of my games along with a small handful of tools to make it easier to add content. I don't really have any aspirations to make a full-blown, general purpose game editor like Godot.

What's the expected workflow?

I'm still working on this, but I have plans for:

• Asset creation and management through Aseprite. I have some ideas for an asset pipeline that uses Aseprite as the core and might involve some code generation
• A scene/level editor. This will mostly be for tile painting and placing entities
• Potentially an entity editor. This will mostly be for simple things like visually aligning bounding boxes, setting origins, etc. Could also select sprites/animations from here
• Hot code reloading? We'll see I guess
• Everything else is just code