As I write this Ludum Dare 28 is underway, and unfortunately I am not taking part.  I planned to, I wanted to, but I have had a terrible cold for the last few days, and all of my energy has been zapped from me.  It struck me that writing a game from scratch in C++ for Ludum dare is fairly hardcore, even with the likes of SDL to make things easier.  What would have been nice is a simple engine to take the pressure off me, so what little strength I have I could have put into just making a game.

That said, I love programming the tricky engine parts, and I don’t like using bulky, bloated off the shelf engines.  I want something I made myself.  So it seems that if I spend my time wisely, making a nice game engine, I could make something amazing next Ludum dare.

I have also received many emails and messages from people wishing that I can write some tutorials on making a game engine, from the bottom up, from the simple things, to the hard things.  So what is to stop me from satisfying these two goals, making an game engine, and documenting the process and my ideas along the way for other to read.  Perhaps others could also use my engine for similar events themselves.

https://bitbucket.org/AidanDodds/litegame

I have started a GIT repository, where I will push my code as it develops.  I will also document the main elements of the engine publicly here.

Lets hope this little project spawns some great games in the future!