Soon after starting graduate school at UT, way back at the end of 2005, my long-time friend coerced me into working on a little game engine project he had just started :)

Personally, I have little interest in most “modern” games (preferring such classics as Riven, Pagan: Ultima VIII, and Super Mario Kart ;). Still, wanting to keep my coding skills in shape, and intrigued by some of my friend’s ideas for a space-based game, I agreed to devote my spare time to helping out.

At first, I thought I might help with some of the 3D work. However, after spending time learning 3D basics to generate some simple race track sections, I quickly found out that 3D is not my primary interest ;)

Instead, I turned to the engine’s internals. To that end, I created a file format for saving game resources (textures, meshes, game objects, etc), an efficient loader for opening and caching files, and a custom serializer for saving sections of a scene’s object graph (allowing an entire scene to be saved to disk, or for creating state deltas for transfer over the network). The chart at left is from some of the early work I did to streamline the performance of the file format, though offhand I can’t recall what optimizations all those labels refer to :)

I also helped out with ideas and concept art for the Warb engine (including the name “warb” itself, which was from a random drawing I made in my green sketch book long ago; and our ameboid mascot, Warbie ;), and for the engine’s first planned game, Sidereal Fury (a.k.a “Space Rage” ;).

Several initial game ideas were stormed up by our little dev team, and for the race idea I was particularly fond of a location around a disentegrating comet plummeting toward a sun. Ice crystals dazzline your vision, steering your ship around small boulders, and watching as a giant chunk of the commet slowly breaks away (and, of course, drifts directly across the race track ;). In the end, we settled on a fun little battle mode for the demo game, but it was still thrilling to see my simple concept sketches turned into actual 3D models :D

Anyway, as my free time decreased (first with ever-more difficult graudate courses, and then with a new job), I ended up devoting less and less time to the project. I would create little icons to display for various game objects, added support for drag-and-drop import of raw media files, and transitioned the file manager from using Managed DirectX assets to XNA. However (still lacking interest in all non-consumer aspects of 3D :), I had little else to contribute, and eventually faded away.

The game project is now called Pocket Realms. Even though the site is not particularly active with public updates, I believe the engine is still being used in other projects, include a little web spinoff. All I know is, when Warb goes public, I’ll have a nice chunk of shares that will dividend my way to a healthy retirement ;)