After Spellcaster Studios closed down, and the development of “Grey” started, I felt the need for a new game development tool, beyond what the Genesis editor could make, with a new paradigm which linked the editor more closely with the game itself. From this, the Surge Editor and the Surge Player were born.

The idea was the you would edit the game in Surge Editor and play it on the Surge Player, but they could also communicate, so I could pause a running game on the Surge Editor, check some values of the scripts running on Surge Player, change values and keep going, all linked with the concept of live update and of a project management system.

The Surge Editor fulfills most of these objectives, and keeps growing. I programmed it all in C++, with the Win32 API.

The editor not only can edit maps in 3d (and optimize them with geometry clusters, shadow clusters, etc), it can build image banks and UIs, generate fonts, all in a WYSIWYG environment closely linked with the game.

The Surge Player runs a Lua scripting engine for all the gameplay, and has a thin layer of C++ code to do the rendering, etc.