Sphere RPG Engine
Role: Linux port maintainer, documentation writer.
Last involved: Early 2009
Sphere is an open source game engine made to facilitate the creation of 2D role-playing games. It consists of two parts: an editor to help create games, and an engine that runs them.
The Sphere editor is a fully-fledged graphical integrated development environment capable of creating tiles, maps, sprites and animations combined with a flexible JavaScript-powered scripting system to bring it all to life.
Meanwhile, the Sphere engine can run games created with the editor on Windows, Linux and macOS. The accompanying configuration utility allows controls to be remapped and the selection of custom video drivers, enabling scaling, filtering and other graphical effects of the player's choosing.
My Contributions
I was a long time Sphere user and community member, creating various tech demos and utilities while contributing documentation on the community wiki. The graphical game launcher that ships with the engine by default is my handiwork.
Eventually I ended up working on Sphere itself, shipping multiple new versions of the engine after a long period of inactivity for the project. I was also a long time Linux user, so I ended up managing compatibility of the engine with Linux as well. Highlights of my work include:
- Porting the old Sphere source code to newer versions of C++ compilers.
- Added to the Linux graphics subsystem.
- Completed the Linux networking subsystem.
- Added music continuation to the map engine.
- Added native font word wrapping.
- Improved the out-of-the-box experience of Sphere for Linux users.
- Bug fixes and community support via forums, email and IRC over the years.