Hi folks!
Some of you maybe noticed the description of the last footage video on our YouTube channel or the post of the SFML forums :
The footage provide you some example of what the project is on SFML, before I take a great turn and went on Unity3D, for the pleasure of your eyes and fingers.
So, you will ask me : where is the 3D? How far did you go on Unity?
Well, the answer is simple : I didn’t go far enough to have some playable demo. :)
Here is the feedback.
Unity is a great software. Its GUI is really well done, intuitive and all. The project structure, resource management, scene setup are really well done and I would recommend it as a great video game making software for intermediate game makers.
Why didn’t I continued on it if it is so well easy to handle?
First, because I’ve been thinking for more than a year about how a game should work, how to organize my project, how my classes should be, and despite the easiness of a full-fledged game making software, I wanted to go with what I did. I wanted to proceed further in my game engine, make it more optimized, better thought, more well done and of course, I wanted to go through the entire course to do a video game.
Second, Unity have its own way to think and I have my own way to think. All in unity is about GameObject. If I want some manager, supervisor or other invisible object, it has to be a GameObject. Unity use C# or javascript as script language, and I don’t really want to begin learning theses languages as I want to specialize myself in C++. It mean a lot of time used to change my way of thinking and to learn new languages.
Third, despite the ships and background are rendered from a 3D software, I love the 2D! Having the game in 2D give it a particular feel that can’t be found in 3D games, plus the facility to work in 2D space instead of 3D space. Having a full 3D background and a layered 2D background is really different after all.
Well, I hope you understand what I mean, if you don’t, I’ll make sure you will. ;)
As a result, I returned to my old game engine, reworking it and proudly naming it “Excellence Engine”, or also “ExEngine” or “ExE”. In some way, you can tell I’m programming a 2D shooting game engine. I surely will speak about it in further articles, including the game/stage editor.
Excellence 
How are you going to handle levels/patterns . Through scripting/lua ? I am looking forward to this aspect which may be the hardest.
I’ll use scripting/lua only as last resort solution. For levels and pattern, I halfly thought how I’ll handle it, but I think I’ll do as I always did : create a robust, bug free and complete collection of classes and link them by binary files with the level/game editor, providing a full graphical gui. :) I’ll speak about it on another articles.