Haaf's Game Engine (HGE) comes to Linux!

QuoteThis is a guest post from Ryan Gordon, announcing the release of Haaf's Game Engine (HGE) for Mac and Linux. HGE is the 2d engine that powers games such as Hammerfight.

Under the hood, Hammerfight uses an engine named "Haaf's Game Engine" (or "HGE," for short). HGE has been popular for 2D indie and casual games in the last few years. It provides a decent wrapper over Direct3D and other common Win32 functionality, plus gives you some basic tools like particle systems. It's an open source project, under a very permissive license, but it's a big pile on non-portable Windows source code.

I had ported HGE to the Mac a few years ago for Red Marble Games. We used it for several games: Magic Match Adventures, Go Go Gourmet and its sequel. This was an education in the casual market: if we could make these games run on a blueberry iMac with Mac OS X 10.0, by god, we were going make it happen. It was great fun; I had to learn to inch as close to the impossible as I could, and develop the wisdom to know when I was close enough to it. As a benefit, the Mac port of HGE could run on some seriously ancient machines.