[shermanyo]

A basic game engine! I was exposed to so many concepts over time, building on a code base I understood from the ground up. It was the first time my code (c++ no less!) felt completely deterministic, that I understood every piece of data down to the byte level, heap/stack/gpu locality at any point of execution, and especially the lifecycle and memory management.

If anyone is interested in creating an indie/hobby game engine, I'd recommend the following:

- game loop with independent render FPS and a constant simulation tick delta (otherwise it runs non-deterministic due to floating point) - "entities, components, systems" architecture (ECS) - data-driven content (load level and game object data from JSON or similar, and programmatically build your scene) - basic event or messaging system

Honestly, I can't think of a field that covers as wide a range of CS topics at the depth I've seen in lower level game development.

If you focus on understanding and implementing the popular patterns and algorithms recommended by the indie community, its not the most daunting of projects. There's so much great information, and a few good books that break down and walk through a working implementation you can build on once you understand it from the ground up.

[pooktrain]

This seems like lots of fun - mind sharing the books that you alluded to?

[shermanyo]

Sure, the main book I had in mind is "SFML Game Development"

https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/sfml-game-developm...

SFML is a C++ library that handles window management, input, sound, etc... For reference, a friend and I went through the book chapter by chapter a couple years ago. He was new to programming, and I'd made a few simple games and read scattered info in the past. The book had a good pace and filled in a lot of the gaps I had.

Another great book is "Game Engine Architecture" https://www.crcpress.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Second-Edi...

This book is a lot deeper, but I found it a great reference. I probably spent more time reading this book and going back over my engine code to refactor based on what I learned (rather than use it as a direct example implementation.

At that stage, there were a few good articles online that were focused on the ECS pattern. Here's a couple, but try to find something that matches your language, there's plenty of info out there.

http://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodmain/node5.html

https://eliasdaler.wordpress.com/2015/08/10/using-lua-and-cp...

https://github.com/junkdog/artemis-odb/wiki/Introduction-to-...

Good luck and have fun!