In January of 2024, I started work on a custom 2d game engine. Now that it’s finished I figured I might as well make a game in it. I’m a programmer, and programmers are bad at naming things, so for now, it’s called Project 4.

What I have so far

The project’s engine is named Bonetree (remember, programmers are bad at naming things). It’s written in C#, and it uses SDL for all its user facing bits. Since both SDL and .NET Core are cross platform, I’ve been able to test it on both Windows and Linux without issues, which is great. The game will definitely be available for Linux since it’s my personal favorite OS, but windows is also a no-brainier since most players will be using it. Mac support is not in my plans, though my friend did manage to get the game working on Mac OS.

As far as gameplay goes, right now when you press new game you get to name your character before being dropped straight into space. The area around the player is randomly populated with asteroids and other computer-controlled starships (which, at the moment, do not do very much). There are Newtonian flight physics and collisions, and you can also fire torpedos at other objects in space.

There’s also space stations that you can ‘dock’ to, but nothing to do in them right now.

The game’s pretty rough around the edges right now, there’s a decent bit of code that needs my attention, and a couple of bugs have popped up that I need to squash, but overall I’m exited.

Plans for the future

The game isn’t very stable at the moment, so I will have to address that right away. Obviously, I will also need to replace my programmer art and public domain images with real art too. In terms of features, I want to add:

• Ship Customization – I’m thinking of first adding the ability to swap out modules on the ship, before adding other ships.
• Trading – My end goal for this game is for it to be a 2d re-imagining of Elite, so a trading system will be needed.
• More Locations – Because one space station and asteroid belt isn’t very entertaining.

That’s pretty much it for now. I plan to keep my blog updated as I make progress. If you’d like to play the game, you can do so on itch.io.

Have a nice day :]