The Birth of a Turtle

About a year ago work began on the first framework I plan to release publicly.  TurtleBrains.  After spending over a decade using C++,

studying all material my grubby hands could grab, and creating several games professional, it is about time I release some software for others to use.  TurtleBrains is a framework aimed at helping create two-dimensional games and real-time applications with native controls.  Also, watching baby loggerhead sea turtles waddle into the ocean with Sonia was priceless.

In 2010 I started working on the OverGameEditor Framework, which at the time was planned for a public release.  The OverGameEditor was purpose built to add operating system level controls to a game for an amazing editor experience.  By adding Menus and some simple dialog controls to an “edit area” the native controls made an editor much better than hitting random letters over the keyboard.  However, the framework was never released because I felt it wasn’t feature complete and was built with some wild Windows magic, hacks.

The scope of TurtleBrains is planned to be a lot bigger than what the OverGameEditor ever was.  It is aimed to be a high-quality, multi-platform framework for Realtime Application and 2D Game Development.  Primarily for games with high-quality tools.  TurtleBrains remained in planning for nearly two and half years before a single line of code was written.  When the developer environment was booted up for TurtleBrains in summer 2013, I made a point to start with Error Handling.  The single most important aspect to a framework which, from experience, is often vastly overlooked.

Since that time TurtleBrains has been building up the Application development portion of the framework.  It now opens a Realtime OpenGL window on both Windows and Mac.  A window menu, or context menu can be added.  Powerful and custom dialog prompts can be built with simple controls and best of all it just works.  Write code once, compile it twice, run on both platforms.  TurtleBrains is still not yet ready for public release, but the portion of TurtleBrains dealing with Application development is getting very close and the documentation is available at a temporary site: http://www.timbeaudet.com/turtle_brains/documentation/

I’ve still got a lot to learn, one thing holding back the public release, besides being too immature and untested, is licensing.  There are many good articles and resources that have attempted to teach me the ins and outs of choosing and applying a license, but so far I just walk in circles.  I know my goal with TurtleBrains is to have supply the framework free for personal use and/or with non-commercial projects with an install base of less than 1000 users, but a low, one-time fee, per person on any commercial projects or those with more than 1000 installs.  Mostly to encourage giving back, I don’t plan to get rich here.