Castagne Engine

Documentation

Castagne Engine

Getting Started

Editor

Gametypes

Intermediate

Making a Game

Pushing Castagne

Advanced

Modules

In order to provide a coherent tool, Castagne follows a development and design philosophy that follows a few core ideas, against which all decisions must go through. These are what I (Panthavma) defined as most important for my own requirements and ideals, and then refined as time goes on, so this article will be more subjective. As such, it is useful to remind people of my skillset and situation: strong programming skillset especially code architecture and graphics programming, specialized 3D skills, and working on projects on the side as a solo dev with not a lot of time to dedicate. As such, I needed a tool that can handle all the funny ideas I could throw at it while allowing me to be as fast as possible when making games. Also while I want to do what is mainly a fighting game, I want to be able to reuse this over various projects, as to not waste that development time. These are the core pillars, in rough order of importance.

Aggressive Focus on Efficient Usage

This is one of the main drivers of the tool, to be able to work very quickly. Time can be sparse, and I don't want to spend it doing busywork. Being solo also limits the opportunities to play with others, and as such I need tools to help me design each iteration better. This results in a few ideas:

Flexibility and Extensibility

This is the second main driver, as to justify the development time of the tool it needs to be reused. This compounds with my desire to include wilder ideas and not be limited by the engine.

Power-User Driven, Learning and Assisting over Simplifying

One big concern I have is to have as few limits as possible on the tool itself, even if approachability takes a hit. This means the tool will focus on its most hardcore users, and would rather teach instead of restricting the tool.

Real Game Development Features

Each line of code is an additional cost to write and maintain, and as such features must be actually useful for games instead of decoration.

Bridge Between Hobby and Professional

Just like me, this tool must handle both the recreational use case, but also scale with the user when they need to go beyond just fun. This is also a way to ensure the ecosystem around the software is strong.