Developer Toolkit: General

Introduction

The developer toolkit for Awesome should involve everything needed to create, modify and maintain a game, sans tools to create art and audio assets. The first order of the day is to determine what tools need to be involved, and how they relate to eachother. The below is an initial draft of thoughts on this subject.

There are two separate areas to deal with: A programming IDE (Henceforth ‘Awesome IDE’) and a World Editor (Henceforth ‘Awesome World Editor’). The Awesome IDE will solely be concerned with writing engine-level logic, the ‘guts’ of the game; the Awesome World Editor will be responsible for the creation and modification of the game world. It remains to be clarified where the bounds of the engine stop and the game world assets take over (Will there be a scripting language? Will environments be organized into scenes? etc).

In general, the tools should strive to be simple (no deeply-nested menu items, no complex popups, etc) and out-of-the-way. Features should be geared towards rapid and intuitive prototyping and creation.