The tech stuff

For the developers among you, this is what I’m using to develop FTCW

For the Common Wealth is written entirely in C. It has only one third party dependency, which is SDL2.

There is also a level builder I use to drag and drop together the levels, which is C# and Avalonia. It saves the level designs as JSON, and exports packed structs that are loaded by the game.

The levels are mostly just sprites. The sprites are PNGs, given an X,Y,Scale and Rotate. There are also things like ordering baseline to make the “depth” in the game work. FTCW is a 2D game pretending to be 2.5D that can pass for 3D if you squint hard enough. Also in the level editor I can add collision regions, audio regions, NPC positioning, and game mechanics like where NPCs consider “cover” or their regular patrol routes.

The level builder covers probably 95% of building any given level, but any element in the builder can also call “hooks” into the game engine for any events specific to that level.

For those who are interested, my main development machine is a i7-12700F PC, RTX 3060, 48GB RAM (bought a few years ago now pretty cheap), and 1TB of SSD.

My screen is a LG 43" 4K IPS Smart Monitor, the size took some getting used to, it’s too glossy, but otherwise I like it. Really I’d like the same thing just a bit smaller, like 40" with a matte screen.