I have been dabbling in game development as a hobby for a while now, and I cannot seam to quite get my games to sparkle at least a bit with some graphics. I have decided to write a simple test game engine that only focuses on the representation of graphics - shapes, textures and surfaces.

While I have a few very simple game engines designed for my own games under my belt, I want to create a game engine that I can use to display and play with graphics. I'm going to do this in C++. Since this is my first time with a major engine, the engine in not going to focus on 3D graphics, it's going to be a mixture of isometric and 2D graphics.

My previous engines have incorporated (been able to draw) or focused on simple flat (almost 2D) non impressive graphic designs and representations of:

• the player
• NPCs
• objects
• walls and surfaces
• textures

Also, I had some basic AI and sometimes even sound.

They also saved and loaded games.

They didn't have a map editor or a level editor. Is this going to be a problem in the future? At this time I have to point out that some of my games didn't get finished because I was to lazy to write the few last levels.

My question at this point would be: What are some things one should know if one wants write (develope) a better graphical game engine with all it's functions.