I originally wasn't planning on trying to make an isolated sprite library for Gtk# (mainly because I've done it so often), but Wordplay is just simply too slow at the moment. So I figured it would be easier to create an isolated library/demo, get everything working up to speed, then put Wordplay back in.

What really made the point is playing Bookworm again, and seeing the eight word tile games that came out in the last six months or so. All of them have a few things in common, one of them is the sheer graphical presence compare to most of the Gnome and KDE games out there. Compared to the fancy games in Windows, most of the Linux games look so plain and uninteresting. I want Wordplay to be at least reasonable in appearance, so I need to add a lot more polish to the game. And that polish needs a good quality graphic engine. I've considering putting the system back into SDL.NET but I don't really want to get lost in the details of making a GUI (again) so I'm going to stick with Gtk#.

One thing that is really obvious about the differences between Linux games and commerical games is an artist. As a writer, I noticed this too. There never seems to be enough artists for everything you want done. So, I might need to find an artist who works for little (read: free) to make it really good look.

Side Note

Actually, I went back to SDL.NET, just to see my old demos, and things changed and I never kept up with them. They don't quite work the way I remember them working, and things seem off. I should probably go back and play with it, just don't really have the time at the point. :(