Going to post my WIP here, and try to give weekly updates, in the hopes of keeping myself honest in working on it. Aiming for an hour a day at the minimum after work, family and other obligations considered, but sometimes shit happens and I miss a few days. I have no game dev experience to speak of so this is as much a learning project for me as it is one of passion.
In that context, I would love if anyone had some good reading recommendations that touch on the more conceptual layout of a game engine, preferably one that has as little to do with programming as possible. Meaning more along the lines of, in the abstract sense, how is a typical game engine laid out, what are their most important components, how do they interact with each other, etc. And any design pitfalls I may run into going into this blind that will leave me kicking myself later and wishing I didn't have to do major rewrites.
Anyways, I've always loved blobbers, been a genre I come back to time and time again, and after recently binging through a few in a row decided I want to try my hand at making a Wiz1 clone since it seems like a fairly approachable project. Using C + raylib for the GUI + OpenGL + lua, and I decided to start by getting some GUI/OpenGL practice in by working on the toolset I'm going to use. My end goal is to have as much as possible outside of the engine, I want to be able to sit down and bang out maps, quests, puzzles, items, creatures, classes, with my own tools to save time.
Here is my WIP mapmaker/renderer that allows me to view the map in real time and walk around as I work on it. Drawing/viewing the map and picking individual textures for walls/ceils/floors/objects (or using the default texture set for all) is currently supported. Currently working on a way to attach lua scripts in editor to various objects, tiles, etc. that are saved/loaded with the map and I can edit to say, have a tile teleport the party somewhere else, link stairs/exit points to another map file, require a certain item to open a door, or require some game flag or world state to be set before progression is possible.
Here's a short webm of it in action.
https://files.catbox.moe/qlah3t.webm