Indie dev spends years writing game engine that he never used
92Yeah, it's true, I wrote a high level cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) 2d engine between 2006-2009 and ended up dumping it and starting something else when the iPhone came along. Don't be like me, try to actually use your engines for at least one game!
I don't recommend actually using this engine for anything, I just wanted a video of it to exist somewhere.
If you wanted to try (or get the source code) you can (I recently updated it to work with Visual Studio 2022): https://github.com/SethRobinson/novashell
To the person who will no doubt comment "why didn't you just use Unity, lol", well, it didn't even run on Windows until 2009 so that wasn't really an option at the time.
Oh, I don't count them as full games but I did use this engine in the Ludumdare 48 hour game jam twice. (Mind Wall, Strong AI)
I ended up rewriting Mind Wall in my new mobile-friendly engine (Proton SDK) and released it as a commercial game later.
There actually was a single game released (at least prototypes) by someone else using this engine though: Paddle Wars: Hit the wall. I think.
Credits:
Novashell created by Seth A. Robinson (www.novashell.com)
Particle system based on source by Wong Chin Foo (LinearParticle)
Box2D physics by Erin Catto (www.box2d.org)
Art from Top View RPG created by Daniel Cook (www.lostgarden.com)
Clanlib V1.0 by Magnus Norddahl, Mark Page, Kenneth Gangstoe and more
🎵 Dressed to Chill by Chris Huelsbeck, used under a
royalty-free license www.patreon.com/chris_huelsbeck