An abandoned attempt at writing a game the hard way: sprites, tilemaps, physics and a Doom-inspired entity scheduler, all by hand in C.
Helios was an attempt to write a game the hard way: the engine, the entity system, the renderer and the tooling all by hand in C, with no Unity, no Godot and no framework underneath.
It got as far as the machinery that has to work before any of the actual game does — tilemap drawing and collision, individual sprites, a physics pass, an entity manager to run them all, and a scheduler borrowed from Doom that let each entity run a little of its own code every frame. That last one quietly turned into most of a cooperative multitasking operating system, which is roughly the point at which writing a game stops being about the game.
This project is no longer being worked on. The devlog entry and the videos below are still here, because the interesting part was always the parts you normally never see, and those are written down.
Stealing Ideas From Doom
Tilemap Game Engine Development - Agon Light C Programming
Writing a game the hard way - from scratch using C - Part 2
Writing a game the hard way - from scratch using C - Part 1
Part of the fun of making a game from scratch is desinging the systems that run in the background. This time I accidentally try to program a cooperative multitasking operating system. But it’s OK, this is how you do this sort of thing…
