Hi! I’m Max.  I collaborated with @petey123567 on DIGHARD for LD29, and it felt so good I’ve decided to keep the ball rolling and go in for MiniLD51.

In general I’ve been developing with Unity, but it’s been kind of love-hate.  I love the content management, but the programming interface is a bit of a minefield (e.g. did you know that .transform is just an alias for .GetComponent<Transform>(), and it’s nontrivially expensive to call a whole bunch every frame? Ew!).  So I’ve been wanting to transition to SDL2, but first I need a better content solution, since SDL2 doesn’t have one, and some higher level rendering primitives than OpenGL.

Enter the Little Polygon Toolchain.

Firstly, there’s a pile of python scripts for plotting sprite and font-glyph atlases, parsing tilemaps, compressing audio and userdata, and exporting everything to a fast native format with a pointer-fixup table that load quickly with plain SDL IO and no fat third-party libraries.

Secondly, there’s efficient Sprite and Spline batchers for using the assets and a GameJam-friendly context-setup-and-teardown object, as well as other handy utilities.  I’m even playing around with Mono bindings for doing mixed C++/C# development and opening builds to end-user modding.

Making tech is fun, but collaborating is even more fun, so I’m totally game to help if you’d like to use this for your project or help me turn this into a proper shrink-wrapped open-source toolkit for general consumption 😀

Excelsior!