I’ve decided to put the foundation I wrote for Anytime Golf up for sale. I’m calling it the Bork3D Game Engine. I think I can carve out a niche in the iPhone engine space for programmer-types with high expectations of the hardware that want a solid foundation on which to build their game. There are other options out there but I believe most game developers look at those and fear (rightfully so, I hear) that those other options won’t meet their performance criteria.
Selling a game engine is an interesting thing. I think the Unity folks have a good business model: they’re clearly targeting non-programmer types who want to put together something 3D quickly. Torque has their iTGB offering that’s similar. There’s a good deal of money to be made there. Unfortunately it doesn’t produce great games. (Oh no he didn’t!) OK in fairness these engines produce awesome games on PC. They are awesome PC engines. I’m a licensed Torque user and I love it. They’re just not mobile engines.
The Bork3D Game Engine was built for mobile platforms. It actually has it’s roots in Rude Engine that I wrote for Vector Blaster, and can run on Pocket PC, Symbian and N-Gage in addition to iPhone. But it isn’t a complete game engine by any stretch of the imagination. If you want in-game content creation tools and a scripting language please leave. However if you want to build in-game content creation tools and install your favorite scripting language, c’mon in!
So what do you get?
- All the source code
- OpenGL ES abstraction layer
- Debug-rendering API
- Component-oriented game object system
- High-performance static and boned mesh rendering system w/ tool pipeline for 3dsmax and Maya
- Decorator system for rendering billboards
- Texture manager w/ tool pipeline
- Runtime “tweaker” for changing game variables via a web browser
- User interface widgets w/ abstractions for handling iPhone user input
- Font renderer w/ tool pipeline for generating fonts (supports unicode)
- In-game profiler
- Audio system for sound effects and background music
- Integration with the Bullet Physics SDK
- Unit test framework
And what does it cost? I’m selling it for only $49 (if you’re indy). Fourty-nine bucks. That’s a lot of code for not much. I’m probably crazy. I guess I’m softening as I grow older, considering this is 1/15th what I was selling Rude Engine for a few years ago.
See bork3d.com for more information.
There are also threads on TouchArcade and iphonedevsdk.com about the engine.