I thought I’d make a few posts about the tech behind Tap-Fu. Tap-Fu was the fist game released with our game engine (Donkey Tech 1) that has been in development for several years already. The engine boasts a long feature list with a lot of cool stuff:

Fully customizable editor written in wxWidgets

Extensive Visual scripting system featuring lazy updates

Asset packaging system

Fully integrated and flexible GUI system

OpenGL, OpenAL, and SDL support

Flexible file format support for WAV, OBJ, 3DS, PNG, PVR as well as many optimized (and proprietary) formats.

Hot loading with all resources.

Sprite and Bone (GPU skinning) animation systems

Streaming audio sound effects with OpenAL. Streaming music system with Audio Queues or SDL

Streams both ASCII and Obfuscated Binary file formats for reading and writing level data. Save anywhere is fully supported.

Built in networking for multiplayer games over UDP. Full network serialization. (WIP)

Brush/BSP based level design (WIP)

Integrated profiling tools

Pluggable Renderer. Deferred shading renderer on Mac and PC enables hundreds of dynamic lights. Shadow map support

Hardware Shader Support. Normal mapping, Parallax mapping, etc.

Modern C++ programming methodology.

Supported platforms include Mac OS X, Windows, and iPhone

Very flexible particle system

Multithreading support including lock free container classes.

Unit testing framework

Using this technology, the Prototypes for both Tap-Fu, Relativity, and a few unannounced titles only took a couple of hours. This includes a full menu system, a customized level editor, save/load and a whole bunch of other features.

Stay tuned for a few posts about some of these specific areas. There’s some neat lessons to be learned.