rpgCore: One Engine, Many Games
The Original Vision
rpgCore applied the Valve Orange Box idea to solo development: one shared engine layer, several very different games on top of it, and no system built twice. It powered a turn-based faction strategy game (Slime Clan), a narrative dialogue piece (Last Appointment), a management simulation (TurboShells) and an Asteroids-style action roguelike, all launched from one manifest-driven entry point.
What Changed
The ideas outgrew the codebase. RFDGameStudio took over as the shared engine for the studio’s games, and OperatorGame carried the dispatch-simulation patterns into Rust. rpgCore was retired on 13 September 2026.
The Harvest
- Nothing was thrown away. The full history — 3,628 commits — stays in the read-only rpgCore repository.
- A working snapshot moved into the successor. It lives at RFDGameStudio/archive/rpgCore, with an
ARCHIVE.mdrecovery index that rates how well each reusable system is evidenced before anyone ports it. - The archive can’t rot into the live code. Isolation tests fail the studio’s build if live code ever imports an archived package.
By the Numbers
835 Python files and 1,264 pytest test functions (excluding rpgCore’s own internal archive folder), plus Godot C# and Rust experiments, built between February and September 2026.