Toy Game Engine: The Thin C++ Game Engine

toy game engine

The “Toy Game Engine” is a thin and modular Game Development Engine that is developed in C++ Programming Language. The Aim of this engine is to provide the thinnest and simplest stack of technology for making games just by using C++ code. The Toy Game offers simple user interface, rendering maps, audio, and it provides a seamless extension of game code with no cost. It has different tools, editors, and scripting tools, to design fully functional 2d or 3d games in less time.

The Toy Engine was released in August of 2018 and is currently under heavy development. The Developing team is working very hard to make it as stable as possible and get it production-ready. Due to Toy Game Engine’s simplicity and modularity, it is hackable, versatile, and extensible. 

Toy Game Engine provides a fully programmable 3d environment and the renderer that gives programmers full control over different tools such as shaders, materials, and render paths, as well as more advanced level tools such as entities, physics, navigation, and procedural generation helper.

To learn more about engines written using C/C++ you can visit mycplus.com

Important Note from the developers: The Toy Engine is currently under heavy development and it is not stable, nor fully documented yet. It’s also not production-ready yet so we can not guarantee and stability from it just now. We will not be responsible for any damage.

Features of Toy Game Engine

The basic principles of the toy game Engine are

simple and lightweight

The main aim of developing the toy was to make it simple. There is not much complex code and you can easily run it on any device. The Toy Engine is so light that it runs on your browser.

Modular

All the functionalities in the Toy game Engine are written in small, simple, and easy-to-understand blocks of code that lie in the libraries that the engine is built upon.

You have Full Control

It’s a collection of modules of codes, and due to that you can easily create your own game environment using these modules and can fully control the modules.

Simple C++ Code

The Toy Game Engine uses simple and native C++ code, which makes it easy to control as compared to other game engines that use different scripting techniques. It also offers more control than many other engines

Educating

The Toy Game Engine provides simple technical solutions to different and typical game programming problems, it is very easy to study, understand, and provides education to people who want to work on game development topics.

More detail about this engine can be found on GitHub.

Underlying Framework

The underlying framework of the Toy game Engine is a Mud framework. This framework provides low-level cross-platform functionality that the Toy Game Engine uses. This framework is built upon a much better library, ZLib.  which is why you can easily compile Toy Game Engine on both Windows and Linux.  Games that are developed using the Toy Game Engine can be run on most modern platforms including mobile, desktops, and even HTML via EMScripten.

C++ Components

The C++ Components that are used in the Toy Game Engine are

  • User Interface
  • Renderer
  • Zero-Cost Scripting (Automatic Binding of C++ code using Lua as binding language)
  • Modular Zero-Cost Tools (Automatic serialization of Game C++ Classes)
  • PBR Pipeline (Renderer Extension that provides different material-based models, HDR Pipeline, glow, etc.)
  • Physics (bullets physics and rigid Body simulations)
  • Navmesh

Example Games

We were unable to find any games that are developed using the Toy Game Engine, but the developer provided some pre-developed games as examples on GitHub. Using those example games you can check the quality of the game that can be developed using this engine.

Platform Example

RTS Game Example

Useful Resources

Github: https://github.com/hugoam/toy

Toy Engine apps: https://www.toyengineapp.com/

Quora Discussion:https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/93ooud/toy_the_thin_c _game_engine/

More C++ Engines: https://www.mycplus.com/featured-articles/list-of-top-100-game-engines-written-in-c-c/

Toy.io: https://hugoam.github.io/toy-io/

Toy game Engine Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=402t7bP14dc

Categories: Blog
M. Saqib: Saqib is Master-level Senior Software Engineer with over 14 years of experience in designing and developing large-scale software and web applications. He has more than eight years experience of leading software development teams. Saqib provides consultancy to develop software systems and web services for Fortune 500 companies. He has hands-on experience in C/C++ Java, JavaScript, PHP and .NET Technologies. Saqib owns and write contents on mycplus.com since 2004.
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