So sorry Joe. It hurts so much to lose these perfect innocent beings

Mate this is a huge achievement, I'm so stoked for you!

It no longer sits right with me to have a Patreon page while I'm not in this full-time, and will be closing this at end of month. I'm grateful to all of the people who pledged in the last year and helped buy me some coffees and pay some bills. Thank you so much! ❤️

The hardest thing for me so far is making the editor something inside the game rather than the other way around. e.g. being able to change an asset file and see it build and update directly while game is running takes some real work to do compared with a static, immutable asset bundle.

I don't believe it's much harder than any other engine. I had to build a lot of bespoke game systems for DFU, and there's always the problem of not being able to plan for everything. Keeping the moving parts small and relatively self-contained with sensible interfaces is good. Experience helps.

If I understand the question, this will depend on the system. Unlike DFU, this game will use a sandbox and scripting language like Lua (TBD). I'll need to open up systems to modders via interfaces. Or did you mean something else on my side re. engine development? :)

My plan is to start a rolling tools demo on Itch soon, so that I can get feedback on stability, etc. It will be limited to just asset builders at first, then I'll open up something new each drop. Patrons will get first look at each release, followed by a public release once I'm happy with it.

Yes. :) The engine tools run inside the game and can be pulled up at any time to view state, drag in assets, and build mods. Everyone will be able to use the tools, just keep in mind it's more of an internal creator platform for my game, not a general purpose game engine like say Unity or Unreal.

Congrats my guy! :D

What's most interesting about this is the editor isn't a standalone app, it's embedded into the game's runtime. The goal is to enable modders to make runtime changes and see them instantly without restarting game (wherever possible). Then package and distribute mods to players as prebuilt bundles.

Up until now, my engine's asset compiler has been a single-threaded command line tool, and a real pain to use. Fully integrating the whole thing into the editor UI makes it faster and easier, overall improving my daily life working with assets.

I started with 6502 assembly on a C64. Practically every aspect of modern game development feels like streamlined productivity magic to me.