Update: "I spent 7 months rewriting my game engine and all I got was this stupid tshirt"

(tshirt not included)

Despite the title, and all the time and effort spent on this engine, I'm actually in a rather cheery mood. The engine is coming along nicely, and I feel like the peace of mind associated with having something that doesn't randomly break for no reason is worth a few months of backtracking. My job has been slowing my progress down quite a bit, but that ends soon and my next job will be a little less time consuming. Still, I haven't had an update post in a while, so I thought I'd explain the current status of the now-rewritten DFEngine.

At this point, I think I can safely call the rewrite 'done', and focus on making games and adding features. The new engine can pretty much do anything the old one did, and then some. To show off that fact, I'm putting together a super-simple game right now. It mostly serves as a 'proof of tech', just showing some basic gameplay and interaction with the engine. With that said, here are some details on the new features(and the game, of course).

New Stuff

With the rewrite about finished, I've started on adding new things again. I think now is a pretty good time to quickly go over the new features:

1. Level and object files! This is one of the biggest things I've been missing since AMAZE. As awful as level creation was back then, it still beat what I had for later projects. Making levels is still a hassle since I haven't built a level editor yet, but it's still easier because everything is in one place. Naturally, it'll also make designing a level editor easier when I get to it.
2. Particle Effects! Particle effects are a nice flashy feature to have in an engine, so I've been meaning to get them into DFEngine for a while. the only game on this site that uses particles currently is Space Douchebag, but with any luck I'll be able to put them into all future projects going forward.
3. Objects can now have multiple components of the same kind, allowing some interesting things. As an example, You could easily make a character with text over their head(text and models are both considered graphical components), just by adding text to the object and offsetting it.

The Game

If you look closely, you can see a cloud of particles towards the bottom

Let's talk about the game now. It's an extremely basic affair, with a little character bouncing on clouds. The goal of the game is simply to get as high as you can without falling,
and I plan on adding a goal height to reach. Other than a win/loss screen, the game is mostly done. I also need to get DFEngine running on Windows, and do a bit more testing. After that, I'll toss the game up on this site. Due to just how small and simple this game is, I don't have much to say about it. Expect a game of similar scale to one of my game jam games, maybe a tad smaller.

I think I'll be making one more game before starting on any major projects with DFEngine, since I still have some issues that could be worked out. I haven't decided on the next game yet, but hopefully I'll have this one out within a week.