Into Space, a game I have been working on

[megamarc]

Thanks for sharing your work! I understand your approach: you write a game engine  in top of Tilengine in C++, and script your engine from LUA, right? This model would fit very well with the idea of integrating it inside libretro/RetroArch for loadable games. A scripting language is the missing piece, as in libretro one expects to load many games from a single core

• A game engine written in C/C++ with:
  • tilengine as the renderer
    
  • embedded LUA to call external scripts
    
  • exposing libretro interface to act as a libretro core
    
• Many loadable games written in LUA
  

The integration to libretro is a good fit for tilengine games, as you benefit from its standarized input system, windowing and all sorts of retro shader effects without having to develop your own.

I did a basic text rendering system for tilengine some years ago, the "old way": you have a tileset with one glyph/symbol on each tile that acts as a fixed width font. Writing text is just a matter of having a layer with the tileset font attached, and update the layer tilemap in real-time, one character per tile. This is how actual 8/16-bit era games render text. The "RetroPang" prototype made with tilengine you can watch here https://youtu.be/3x-RmMktoO0 uses this method for the scores.

I expect this forum becomes more lively, and I really appreciate your enthusiasm about this project. I hope you have fun, learn and make good progress!