Mosaic

A very simple engine for game design that can grow with you.

Written in C++

Rendering by OpenGL

Platforms:

• Windows

Philosophy:

The goal of Mosaic is to provide a simple and low-level environment to start making games. Since the graphics are simple (just colored tiles) and and it makes no assumptions about how your game should be structured, it provides you the opportunity to create and solve problems on your own. The problems may be simple ("how do I see if these tiles collide", "how do I change this color value", "what does it mean to beat a level?") but they are worth learning how to solve and will train you to become a better game designer.

Rather than providing many complex features it leaves the implementation to you as an opportunity to get practice solving problems. A lot of the features an engine gives you are the low-hanging-fruit features, but that means you miss a great opportunity to tackle some approachable problems. And once an engine has solved the easy problems for you there are only hard problems left, and you want some experience solving problems before taking those on.

Mosaic is a game engine that's easy to understand, to peel back the layers and check underneath the hood. It is the bare minimum needed to get a game running on Windows.