Scrapping my 2D Engine
So I downloaded this XNA 2D game engine for a game I was working on. Initially it seemed great, the functionality provided were weeks ahead of what I had written myself. So I scrapped what I had been doing and decided to just work off of what I had. It was rather exciting, I had a game that scrolled, allowed me to jump around, and with a little work, load a level from an array.
As I've started to want to add new functionality though, I've realized that the engine isn't written how I'd like it to be. Everything in the engine is treated like a tile, from the player to the enemies to the level tiles. While this obviously worked for the game the engine was designed for, it's causing me some serious headaches implementing it for my game.
I've reached a point now where as much as I hate going backwards, the engine I am working with is just too complicated to do things like collision detection and drawing to the screen, especially since my game objects won't always conform to a nice standard tile size. I can look at some of the logic in this engine and implement that to my game for handling things like jumping, but trying to use this engine directly in the long run seems like it will be not only more work, but also not work the way I want it to.
On a side note, I've been doing nothing but ASP.net development for the past several years. It's so nice to not have to worry about the page lifecycle stuff… I populate an object and its there for me to use until I destroy it. It's very liberating not having to repopulate all my variables and objects whenever the game loop repeats.
This article has been view 127 times.
|