Ventures of an ex indie game developer

Free game engines++

When I started out writing a game engine fifteen years ago or so, the end-goal was to create a good one that could be sold. It didn't take long to realize that would never happen, but I stuck to the idea of developing a game engine and not just games.

Possibly one of the poorest choices in my life. I've spent enormous amounts of time on details that UE4 and others surely solves more elegantly and without sleepless nights.

In the duration of the project I've started a game engine from scratch, abandoned that to work with a friend's game engine, then abandoned that one to work on another friends game engine. Eventually, in 2006 I think, when he abandoned ship, I gave no shat about the redundancy and poor quality of the base we'd lined out and I just ran with it. 3 year later the UE3 SDK became free and last year UE4 came out. 7 years post UDK3 and my game engine is so utterly pointless that there is no point in keeping it to myself.


Not only have I struggled too many years, but I also had no time to refactor the code where it hurts. One especially poor decision, to use inheritance in two central "GameTicker" and "GameManager" classes makes my own eyes bleed, not to mention what it must look like to an outsider. Another bad decision. to use asynchronous resource loading to be able to stream huge amounts of world data (think MMOG), was also an awful one as it makes for horrible, fragile code, and there are coroutine options since 10+ years which would have been a much nicer solution.

When we started coding many years ago, hungarian notation seemed like a good choice. Now that I release the source code free I wanted something better, so I converted to something similar to Googles C++ coding standard. I wrote a small Python script for it, but it was non-trivial to get things flying and I easily spent two days on it.

Anyway, the code is out there. If anybody ever has any use for it, great! If not, well, hopefully I learnt something in the process. If I did, maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Trial and epic fail must the closest to the meaning of life one could ever get, right?

About the author

Mitt foto
Gothenburg, Sweden