I posted the following on the Card Kingdom development blog.
Prefabs were added into the engine quite late in the development process, but made making “waves” of enemies in the game very easy to create. Prefabs, or prefabricated objects, in our system are small chunks of XML that define a single game object with all of it’s components and any children as well. These objects can then be used multiple times throughout the XML definition of the game. Common objects such as crates, barrels, enemies, weapons, etc. are defined as prefabs. One side effect of how prefabs are realized in the engine is that a prefab can have other prefabs in their definition. For example, the Goon prefab has a link to the Poleaxe prefab. This separates out each object into their own specific file. Any updates to the Poleaxe prefab will automatically be in each enemy when created.
Going forward in terms of the engine, here are some things I want to see (most of these probably wont get in, but I can dream):
- Differed Rendering
- Multi-threading
- Local Multiplayer
- In game editor
- Binary serialization format
- Scripting integrated
- Object culling
Beyond these, just general maintenance and code optimizations are needed to move forward.