Edit: This blog post will also serves as a temporary description for the engine.
Yup technical post ahead, but if you are into making game, you should stick with us!
RedBox
What is RedBox?
RedBox is a 2D engine (well for now
) designed to run on every major platform. We were greatly inspired by the well known Flixel and unity3d engines. We wanted to mix the cool stuff that both engines had and of course, add our own grain of salt... I mean, flood it with salt, we got tons and tons of ideas for this engine!
Who, how, when, potato?
We want our engine to be usable by the widest array of persons. This mean: free and easy to use, without sacrificing its usability for pro/commercial games. I think it's pretty clear now that a 2D game can be really profitable *HUM HUM ANGRY BIRD HUM HUM*.
Our engine WILL be open-source and free to use as soon as we judge it ready, but for now, there's still a lot to do. Our schedule says we should get it up and ready around June 2011, but we are getting delayed a bit since we are a small studio. Also, we don't like the idea of releasing it before we made a game or two with it, you know, to test drive it.
This summer, there will be the third edition of a prototyping competition in Québec City (Bivouac Urbain), which will give us the opportunity to test it in a "global game jam-like" condition. (Crunch time!)
We also have a "bigger" game (let's say a game that isn't made in 48 hours without sleeping...) we wanted to release on smart phones (the gameplay is kinda weird, it won't be playable on PC without joysticks or multitouch, but more details on this in a later post
).
When those two games will have been made, we should have worked on it enough for it to be usable in a commercial and/or competition workflow. (If that mean anything anyway...)
Features (the cool part!)
State system
We really liked the state system of flixel, so we wanted one. It is in fact greatly inspired by flixel on this regard.
An editor!
We wanted one, no matter what! I would really like it if my grandma was able to make games or my artist was able to balance the game without asking me to make changes in the code every 10 minutes. A graphic editor, that is the solution. We have a lot on our mind about this one. For the first release, it probably won't do much; tilemaping, creating shapes, texture mapping, lot of asset pipeline goodies and other stuff I can't put a name on it at the moment.
As soon as we can, we want to add a graphic script editor. Something like kismet for the UDK (not the wifi kismet). It will give you the ability to prototype a game without even writing a line of code, but we really need to work on something else before we attack this behemoth, which leads me to my next point.
Scripting and language
Currently, everything is in C++ (except the backend platform dependent code, which is in Objective-c on iOS and Java on Android). It is not likely that my grandma will learn C++. We are looking to add a script interpreter before the end of the year. We are not sure which one we will add first, but we are interested in Javascript, LUA and Actionscript. Those won't remove the possibility to write your classes in C++.
We want to push it even further. We want to make those scripts compilable into native code (by native code I mean native code, not bytecode) and we are looking into making the engine work from other native languages than C++. That would kick ass! But don't wait for this awesomeness this year (blame the fact that I still need to eat/sleep).
If you you don't understand what the last paragraph was about, let's resume it this way: write in whatever language you want for whatever platform you want.... yup, I know...
Platforms
Currently, the engine runs on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, Linux and we are working on Flash support (we also want to add JS/Canvas/HTML5 at a later date.)
We are also looking for more "commercial" platform if you know what I mean
, but I can't really tell much at the moment.
The editor is developed with Qt, which means it will be able to run on Windows, OS X and Linux.
I'll keep you posted about the dev!
I got ideas for some less technical posts as well