Can I make a game from scratch, without any engines or game development specific libraries, using only APIs from my target platform?

…

Who knows.

The “Game”:

As a medium for this challenge I have chosen a tribute game to a series long dead - MMBN & MMSF. This idea surfaced together with a piece of concept art for the supposed fourth game in the sequel series. My already existing thirst for more chip/card collecting and virus busting only deepened after this news.

The other part comes from popular and alive series of monster catching games. Although my hands-on experience has ended with, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the series that is Generation V, I still follow it to this day interested in what new designs and mechanics the developers will come up with. That’s why in addition to introducing mon-catching mechanics, I also want to base the overall looks on the NDS era generations IV and V. Yes, I am one of the few people who instead of jumbled pixel mess saw a system used to its fullest when it came to the animated in-battle sprites in Black/2/White/2.

Ultimately I want to mesh the two concepts above (as there are some mechanics that fit together naturally in my opinion) just with a different coat of paint - instead of internet and programs/monsters you’ll get spirit world and ghosts. Boo!

The Tools:

The engine is being written in C++. Naturally, it uses the standard C++ library. Since I am targeting Windows (for now?), it employs Win32 API for basic stuff and DirectX for multimedia (currently only Direct3D for graphics, XAudio and XInput will be utilized later). These are my constraints. It also uses DirectXMath for vector and matrix operations currently, but that will be replaced later by my own implementation.

The engine is still early in the development and is far from being feature complete. All assets are work in progress and/or placeholders. I work on this project in my free free time. (Time after work is free time. Time after playing games in the free time is free free time.)

Speaking about free, the game when/if finished will be 100% free.

Keep up the spirit~