Nice news on the Mac front (I'm more of a Linux guy myself).
I wrote a tile-based 2D sider-scroller engine a few years ago. Working on the project was fun, I also created a map editor and a bunch of other tools. A friend from highschool and myself were going to turn it into some big epic 2D RPG... which never happened, of course
It's quite impressive that the two of you managed to pull such a project off, and what a gorgeous looking game it is.
My coding fingers have been itching for a while to attempt this again. I'm currently in the process of writing design documents (both for a game and the engine driving it) and researching possible APIs and techniques to pull it off. So far I've chosen the SDL for input & sound (used this on my other game projects), OpenGL for video (used software rendering in the past, except for one funky 3D OpenGL demo) and C++ for the actual code magic. And of course FLTK (
http://www.fltk.org) for crafting the tool GUIs (easy to use cross-platform GUI API).
Oh, and getting collision detection done riiiiight can be a bitch, it's usually the hardest coding part for me
I'm always interested in the tools other people write to create their game worlds and animations, so screenshots of your Aquaria tools would be much appreciated. I read that you even created a custom application for handling the 2D skeletal animation stuff. Sounds fun
