So for the past few weeks I've been wasting my free time on a giant project called the Flash Template Project.
The goal of the project is to write an ENTIRE game engine for ActionScript 3.0 in Flash. I'm looking at Flixel and FlashPunk for good examples of how to start with specific components of the engine, which I expand and change heavily based on my own ideas and impressions.

Compared to the time I've spent on it, it's quite far already.
I've programmed the basic structure of the engine and am now working on more detailed components.
The sound engine is mostly in place, including creating and removing sound sources and listeners. I just need to add pitch for sounds.
The world-switching engine is in place, which I use to go from one level to another.
The input for keyboard and mouse works well enough, I've yet to calcuate the in-world position using the on-screen position of the mouse.
The time is calcuated and slomotion effects can be applied. Delays can also be created.

The Drawing engine is well under way. Camera's can be created and defined what part of the screen they take, and sprites will be drawn on the correct position in all the camera's. Sprites can also be colored, faded in / out, rotated, scaled and rotated after scaling. The scroll factor can also be adjusted. This will create the illusion of depth by making distant objects move less across the screen as they or the camera move.
The resulting image can be cached for optimized and efficient use of memory.

The strong point of this engine compared to Flixel is that a sprite is transformed once, saved, and not calcuated again until it is transformed again. In flixel, a rotated or scaled sprite is constantly calcuated, which eats up massive performance. Especially if you've got lots of rotated sprites.
In the FTP engine, the caching possibilities for the sprites are a bit bigger too and if used correctly can save tons of performance and memory.

Next up is animations and the collision engine. But before that, I've got an important school week to run through.


If you're interrested in the progress of the game engine, follow me on twitter.
I almost only tweet about the progress of the game engine.