Knowledge of game engine architecture is essential to understand what makes games function. Control over the software can empower developers in ways premade engines cannot. I have been diving into creating my own game engine for a 2D over the top shooter idea. With lessons from a tile based game engine I put together in Java back in 2018 using a graphical library, I used a C++ library to recreate some of Unity’s features at a surface level.

In it’s current state it has a basic implementation of the following features:

• Entity Component System

• Transform hierarchy

• Entity inspector, with variables and components able to be changed at runtime

• Entity and Level serialization (Saving and Loading, Prefabs)

• 2D entity collisions

• Display layers and layer logic (UI and collisions)

• Level Play/Stop/Pause feature to build and test levels

• Basic level creation features like placing/moving/rotating entities

• Coroutines and game timer

Despite all of it’s basic features, the brief demo above also showcases it’s shortcomings. Limited camera features, terrible performance and the inability to create a game executable makes this a useless game engine, but it as served me to learn the ropes, as I plan to reiterate using a more low level 2D renderer instead of a plain image and text library, and moving away from Unity’s way of designing an editor.