I’ve just started a new game engine for Android called Chum. I’ll be using a lot of code and knowledge from the engine I wrote for CowPotato, as well as from many other resources, so it’s not a from-scratch effort. The main focus on the engine will be:
- 2D and 3D OpenGL ES
- Incorporate best practices for OpenGL setup, touch and accelerometer handling, etc
- Simple loading and management of meshes, textures, sounds
- Handle much of the boiler-plate stuff like exception handling
It’s not intended to be a super-duper, whiz-bang engine to start with. It will mostly be geared at my needs for some games I have in mind (including fixing lots of problems in CowPotato), and serve as a testbench / prototyping tool. A general game engine will never be able to be as finely tuned as a purpose-built engine for each game, but it should be sufficient for a wide variety of applications, at least as a starting point.
I also plan to make Chum open-source, but I’m not sure how / when that will happen. I’m thinking of some possible business models (to get at least some marginal monetary benefit) such as services / tutorials based on Chum, but I still have a lot to figure out.