Overview

A few years ago I started to develop an adventure game engine called "Indiana". The basic idea was to make it easy to program old school point-and-click adventure games in a portable way with free and open software. There are already lots of engines out there but most of them lack at least one of the following properties:

• Is open source software, ie. everyone can contribute to the engine, if something in the engine doesn't please you, you can just fix it.
• Portable, ie coding and playing both work at least under Windows and Linux (I have nothing else at hand to test). Lots of engines are limited to Windows.
• Use a real programming and/or scripting language so the game coder has the full power at hand and is to a lesser extend a victim to the imagination of the engine designer.

The "Indiana" project was written in the D programming language using SDL. However lately I had so severe problems with the D toolchain hat I decided to rewrite the complete thing in C++. The new engine is called "Grail" and uses C++ as well.

Grail plans

When finished Grail will include:

• A C++ library for coding adventure games that uses SDL similar to Indiana before.
• An executeable that is able to run games that are completely defined with lua code and media files. Ie it will be possible to develop and test games without the need for a working compiler toolchain. Also it will be possible to attach a complete game to the executeable for easy one-file-distribution. Naturally there will be a runtime for Windows and for Linux (and possibly other OSs).
• A scene editor. In the first phase this editor will just help you to graphically place objects and define regions and generate some lua code for you from this information so you don't have to "guess" and type in positions of objects and such. In the second phase this editor will turn over into something more similar to a complete development environment for adventure games like Visionaire, Adventure Game Studio, Wintermute, etc...