Jan 05, 2017

Trying out the Orx Game Engine

Orx is an open-source, ultra-portable game engine with a strong core focus on data-driven design. For being so niche, it’s actually quite mature in game-years. It’s more than a decade in the making. It has its quirks, but I like it a lot so far. It’s honestly more like a game library than it is an engine, but whatever.

It uses a highly customized deviant of INI config files for defining the vast majority of game behavior. Since exploring data-driven development, I’ve found my code more sparse and clear, which is always a win.

Not convinced yet? Consider this: almost all game codebases eventually tend toward a data-driven architecture (provided you don’t hate yourself) for totally practical reasons. Prototyping is a big one, but general configurations are central to all games. Some engines solve this problem slightly differently, but ultimately data drives much of game behavior from an architectural standpoint.

In any case, Orx’s focus is on robust expressive data, but it’s API mirrors it in a way that’s flexible enough to enable you to do things your way. It’s up to you to decide on a balance between data and code.

One of my favorite things is the community, particularly the creator. He’s a professional game developer and is also the most helpful, welcoming human being I’ve met to date (online or otherwise). But everyone in this community is helpful, and there are a few very active members besides the creator who have been a pleasure to chat with daily.

So yeah, I’m only just starting to scratch the surface, but I’ve already started on a skeleton/template project for my own benefit, and hopefully other people’s as well.

I’ll likely post more on Orx as I use it more, but for now, I urge you to try it out as well. At least look at it. Or don’t; your call.