My (real) name is Daniel, I'm currently working at a factory, but have a bachelor's degree in game design and programming, and I'm here because I'm looking for a forum to talk about, and ask questions pertaining to the development of what will be an open source game engine I'm working on (it has a github repo (
https://github.com/BionicFelps/Crunch), but at the time of this writing there is no code uploaded to it because I've just barely started writing it).
My abilities are all on the programming side, a friend and I are starting a company, and the way I decided to get started on the project without causing him any legal headaches was to develop the engine separately as an open source project, the license hasn't been decided yet, but I'm looking for something similar to GPL, that would require any modifications to the engine to be open source as well, however, I don't want to require game assets (such as scripts) to be under the same license, IE: even though I consider a game built on the engine to be a "derived work" I don't want to force that work to be GPL... Only if C++ native source code was modified do I want copy-left to apply.
The engine itself will handle some things, and give direct bindings to other libraries for other things, the idea is to use SFML, Box2D, and Angelscript to cobble something usable for rapid prototyping. Our immediate game design will be a 2D platformer so the engine is focused on that somewhat. I plan on having simple bindings for both traditional frame-based animation, and 2D-skeletal animation. I realize this project is similar to Torque2D under the MIT license, however, I found the Linux support lacking, and honestly just didn't like the looks of the code, the directory structure used in the repo is also quite confusing, with different entry points for different platforms rather than using pre-compiler directives. An interesting thing about my choice of libraries is that they all expose a fairly clean C++ interface, so I should be able to maintain a clean, object-oriented engine, I may later make a 3D version with bullet and I don't know, probably OGLPlus since SFML doesn't handle 3D assets.