Basics

This series of articles is not intended to teach how to write game engines, nor is it intended to claim the correct way of doing things.

I should say that at the time when I began the development of War 1, I was influenced by a new way of doing things, at least for me. At school, I was taught to think in certain ways about programs and how they behave. I used to think about programs in a very top-down way and work my way to the specifics of the program. That involves a lot of figuring out ahead of time what kind of problems you will need to solve and make a solution that can solve those problems. I won’t say it’s wrong, because that works well for certain types of problems or programs, just that I wanted to explore the other way.

I wanted to think about programs in a bottom-up way. Making the features as the program itself ask me to. That’s not the same as going through the development seeing just the problem that is in front of you. You need to have a guide, you need to know where you are going, you need to see the big picture at some times.

For instance, I knew that I needed a rendering system to render sprites easily, so I did that. And that will serve me as a foundation for all the rendering in the game. Then I knew that I needed a path-finding system and that that system will connect (I wasn’t sure how at the time of writing each system individually) with a system to make the characters (or units as I call it) behave in certain ways. Then I knew I needed a command system to give orders to the units, and also that that system would connect somehow with other systems, but also knew that the command system was far away on the development that I didn’t want to dictate what it should look like, or writing it from the start. I was thinking that the command system will show its true form for this game when I get there. The same with the entity system. I didn’t want to dictate how an “entity manager” should look like, that came later in the development when I needed to optimize some operations and knew that was the right time to make an “entity manager”.

I should also say, that I have had success with that kind of thinking about the development of the game and engine. And looking back now, I know it would have been very difficult to know ahead of time how each one of those systems would look like. Many decisions on those systems came because of practical and specific problems that I needed to solve, and not by thinking about what kind of problems I would face if I tried to think about them without actually facing it.