I’m that type of programmer that needs to know how everything works and likes to make everything custom to his needs and a few months ago I took on the project of building my own generic 2D game engine in Java.  So far it’s going really well and is capable of producing all your standard types of 2D games(platformers, rpgs, strategy, puzzle).  I was wondering if any other members of the community have taken on a project like this?  I know most game developers are here to make games and not many want to be bothered with low level things like making their own engine from scratch, but if you have then here’s a great place to talk about it.

I can say yes.  I did it in pascal in highschool.  my partner and myself wanted to recreate the original astroids game. Since no basis for it existed in pascal we had to come up with our own. lol
hehe, probably not relevant to what you’re doing.

@distance880 That’s still making your own engine, even though it had a more specific purpose.  I’m trying to create one that’s more generalized so that when I’m finished I can pack it all up into a library and start making some fun games without the hassle of having to pick a Game Engine and then getting frustrated when it doesn’t support something I need or if I come across a bug somewhere and it has me pulling my hair out.  Regardless of that, even asteroids has some complex game mechanics such as rotating a sprite and handling the trajectory of asteroids when they get shot and burst apart into more asteroids.

@rabidbluejay1  There were some problems we never solved.  We didn’t have the luxury of sprites.  The most we had were polygons what we could draw and fill, so it was a bit of a phong.
I will say that one thing I noticed about unity that I like, as pertains to 2d games, was the built in physics.  You can get alot of things to happen in unity by just applying simple, ready made properties to whatever is serving as your objects, and then giving them collision, ect. 
That’s probably a basic observation, but it had an impact on me, just watching the prepared demonstrations of the built in physics, I got so many ideas on things I could make just from them alone.    Most of what would have needed to be custom coded would be like what is keeping score, conditions of winning, ect.  But the ‘movement’ of things was already all there, built in, for the most part.  This makes sense for what a game engine is supposed to be if you consider it.    I’m thinking of games with physics though, like simple puzzle games involving bouncing balls and balance scales.

Yes the physics and collision are probably the most complicated part of a game engine, but I will say that they are also the most rewarding.  Right now I only have a basic collision engine and a simple physics engine that handles gravity, but just those minor things can spark so much life into a game that it can’t help but put a smile on my face every time I see my test player accelerating towards a platform where he will meet his demise.  

Are you an artist as well?

Yes, I made my own cross platform 2D engine, it’s now open source: 
https://github.com/cdoty/SuperPlay

My engine took a novel approach to texture usage.

@distance880 Not a very well versed artist, but I have created a few assets such as sky backgrounds and some geometry art.  I’m also fairly decent at piecing together simple music tracks(which is invaluable experience when making a sound engine for the game engine).  I’m sort of a jack of all trades, but my strong suite is programming which is why I’m so thankful for this place, a lot of the assets are nice high quality productions that don’t break the bank.

@rabidbluejay1
I’m kinda the opposite.  I know enough about coding to hold a conversation, but i’m primarily and artist.  I’m always up for collaborating.  Lemme know if you’re ever up for some projects. 

@distance880 Sounds like a possibility, I’m not starting any projects for a few months(wanna finish school first, get my java certification, and finish my engine), but when I do I’ll let you know.  I only know 1 other person that into game design, but he went to school for level design and 3D modeling(I’m much more into 2D).  Is there a place I can reach you besides here, Facebook or email potentially(mine is [email protected])? 

@cdoty That’s cool man! What’s been the most difficult part for you? Mine has been writing the sound engine, messing with streams of byte arrays and buffers and applying and building filters for them is just a whole new experience that I’m not used to xD

@rabidbluejay1 Luckily I used existing sound engines (Hekkus Sound Engine and irrKlang), or that would have also been my most difficult part. The port to iOS was pretty challenging, mostly because of the XCode. Luckily I found AppCode, which saved me from having to use XCode a lot.

@cdoty I dislike XCode so much, I just finished my Objective-C class today and have to take iOS development in the Spring, but the whole feel of the IDE just doesn’t sit right.  I also don’t care for the Syntax of Objective-C since it’s so different from every other language.  That’s mainly why I picked Java since it’s already multi-platform.  I may write a version for Android, but not anytime soon, I mostly despise mobile games and everything they stand for(addictive, simple gameplay and micro-transactions)  

@rabidbluejay1
https://www.facebook.com/Distance880

Hey guys, 
Just thought I’d pop in here and say hi. I’ve been working on my own cross platform game engine for a few months now using C#. It’s not currently open source but I plan to open it in the future. It has some pretty interesting features:- It uses portable class at the core, so most of the code is inherently cross platform.- It’s got a mostly working scene editor written in WPF that makes game GUI creation a breeze.- The engine is component based, so you can compose entities from various components (sprites, particle emitters, sound emitters, physics, etc).- It’s pretty extensible, you can create your own components and the editor will pick them up dynamically.
My goal is to make an editor that helps bring game assets to life. For example, there are many GUI packs on gamedevmarket, but loading them into your game and making them clickable buttons isn’t trivial. The editor is designed to let you create the “screens” and save them to a JSON data file. Then you can use a library to load them into your game and hook up the OnClick event handlers, so to speak.
I’ve got the prototype working. Eventually I’d like to add support for more game engines outside my own. Perhaps a library for MonoGame, LibGDX and whoever else is interested. Here’s a screenshot of the latest build of the editor.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3m7srysobyaeijr/astrid_studio1.png?dl=0