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Bare Bones engine

Overview

The Bare Bones game engine, is my custom 3D/2D game engine. In actuality, this is more of a "graphical template" for OpenGL projects than a typical GUI-based game engine like Unity or Unreal. The aim here, is more for this to be a tool that assists developers in making games with maximum customisability and flexibility but with minimum "pre-work" already done for them. It is quite literally "bare-bones".

Development

Bare Bones has its own custom maths, text-rendering and model/animation libraries (among many others!). Development of a new project can be done using this tool by simply creating a new main.cpp file and importing your desired libraries and putting something together. OpenGL can often be frustrating to set up, let alone needing to download and install countless libraries in order to make creative, visual works. This was developed as a way to provide an easy way to intuitively programme a graphical, interactive project in C++. Bare Bones is planned to be released publicly after the completion of my second game.

Features

PostPro

PostPro is a quick and easy-to-use library to add filters/effects to the screen as well as add drop-shadows at the drop of a hat (or the switch of a boolean). With a range of customisable effects, such as pixel-graphics, retro filters and more, PostPro can help create the perfect art-style for your project/game.

Blender Addon

The engine works with Blender in the form of a handy export addon. This tool allows you to create full environments (.env format) that can be efficiently loaded into your scene as well as static objects (.obj format) and animated objects (.aho format). Using this addon, stored animations can be reloaded onto your loaded model and edited as well as deleted from the file's data.

AHOs and ENVs

You may be quite confused at this point to see ".aho" and ".env" appear in the above paragraph. These have been created as a simple workaround to the ultra-simplicity of Bare Bones. Animated Hierarchical Object (.aho) files are essentially modified .obj files with an additional section for hierarchical relationship information at the start and appended n number of animation data appended at the end describing just positional data at recorded keyframes. Bare Bones then handles the parsing and interpolation. Secondly, .env files essentially describe the arrangement of .objs or .ahos in a particular environment. These files are typically very small as they just provide the simple positional data for pre-exported model files. Bare Bones then handles the parsing and application of transformations.

About the developer

My name is Adam Oisín Handschuh. I'm a game developer, musician and founder of Hidden Palm Interactive; a game studio based in Dublin, Ireland and started in 2020.

I'm 23 and have a degree in Computer Science and Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin. As well as making games, I am currently working full-time as a professional 3D visual artist.

These games aim to tell interesting stories across unique worlds, mainly falling within the genre of puzzle-adventure. At this point, I have just my debut release: Vorago on both Steam and Itch.io.

My debut Vorago is a puzzle-adventure horror game and was developed over the course of 4 years, exclusively using the Processing IDE.

Currently, I'm developing my second game Venki which is being created using my own custom 3D game engine, built from the ground up. This is expected to release in 2027.