Hello, and welcome to FlatWare-Engine.org.
We doubt that many people will see this original message, as we do not intend to promote the site until the 0.1 Alpha is ready for release. However, for any that do happen across this website, let me tell you a little about what we are trying to accomplish.
We intend for the FlatWare Engine to be a (fairly) easy way for anyone with decent programming experience to be able to create a 2D game. The early releases will center on C++, but we hope to extend to Python support later. Most of the complex operations normally associated with creating a game will be handled behind the scenes, allowing the user to focus on creating content, which we feel is actually the heart of a good game. We also hope to keep adding features to help make 2D games throughout the life of the project. One example would be native support for isometric graphics.
Eternal Sage and I, originally went looking for a good SDK or engine with which to develop some ideas we had into functioning games, but we were pretty disappointed at every turn. There was very little available that could be considered an end-to-end solution for making 2D games across multiple platforms. While there were good tools available, none were as broad or as complete as what we needed, so we decided to strike out on or own and create an engine to bring together available tools into something cohesive that would meet our needs.
A professor at our local university convinced us to turn our project into an independent study and led us to decide to develop this engine for use by anyone that wants to make 2D games. FlatWare has already gone through a couple of incomplete iterations, and we have simplified and restructured it so as to make it much easier for the average programmer to use.
We have both seen excellent games turned out by independent developers and we hope that others (as well as ourselves) will be able to use our engine to create even more games for everyone to enjoy.
MadCat13