::An introduction…
Welcome to ZTurtleMan’s World of Wonder, adventures in Turtle Arena and other things.

Here I will write about Turtle Arena development, features, and releases. And probably other things. The purpose of creating this blog was to allow me to easily write about Turtle Arena development as it happens.

::Turtle Arena
Turtle Arena is a free and open source cross-platform third-person action game. It is inspired by the Ninja Turtles and various other video games.

::Long history… in short
Turtle Arena is not my first game project. The first began sometime around June 2006, upon finding a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame called Sonic Robo Blast 2 (SRB2). (SRB2 uses the Doom Engine created by id Software.) I really liked SRB2 and wished there was a Ninja Turtle game like it. I began learning everything about SRB2 and modifying it to be a Ninja Turtle fangame. Though I kept to myself and didn’t talk about what I was working on or release anything. My goal was to create the I would consider to be “the best” Ninja Turtle game. The game used graphics and music from official Ninja Turtle games along with some graphics I had created, but most data was from SRB2 (although some graphics were modified to be green). TMNTinSRB2 was far being in a complete game.

The SRB2 engine limited some of the things I wanted to do, so I looked for another engine to use. I found a few such as CrystalSpace and ioquake3 (based on quake3 by id Software) but was unable to compile or do anything with them. I began creating my own engine from scratch, Shell Engine. Shell Engine was designed to have the features I wanted but did not seem possible using SRB2’s engine. I added things like four player splitscreen, right from the start. After about 4 months I give ioquake3 another try as I was basically working to add features already present in ioquake3. It had been about 2 and a half years since I played SRB2 for the first time. I was able to compile ioquake3 and started reading the code, and just about everything I could find about quake3. Then I started making changes.

Turtle Arena is far more complete and playable than my two previous Ninja Turtle fangames. However, I still haven’t add all the features from them to Turtle Arena. Recently, four player splitscreen mode was added to Turtle Arena, which was the main feature that Shell Engine had that ioquake3 did not.