Assets

In the last post I said that I would write a dedicated post about the asset system once it was finished. The rewrite was finished at the end of December, followed by a couple of weeks of work on tags in January, and then the engine sat untouched for most of the year. Since then a lot has changed, so I’m splitting the catch-up into three posts. This one closes the asset system chapter, the next one is about the new platform layer, and the last one is about how games are built on top of the engine now. ...

Before making Kaban Engine public, I started reworking the asset system. What was supposed to be a small, focused change turned into a larger cleanup pass, because once I touched it, several weak spots became obvious. The original goal was simple: end up with a built asset file that the game can load quickly and query efficiently. That meant tightening definitions, removing ambiguity, and enforcing rules. Tags The first thing I tackled was the tag system. ...

After completing my initial demo for my school capstone project, I set out to transform my work into a proper game engine, prioritizing ease of use and flexibility. My first focus was enhancing asset management and map editing. During the demo’s development, I built a basic tilemap editor that allowed me to place tiles, define collision boxes, and add static entities like trees, stones, and houses—represented as textures with collision data. It worked, but it lacked a user interface, undo/redo functionality, and advanced features like object manipulation or in-editor simulation with a player character. The output was three binary files—tile_map.bin, decorations.bin, and collisions.bin—containing tile textures, entity placements, and collision data. ...