MD Engine simplifies game development for Sega Genesis and Mega Drive

Sega may once again be able to do what Nintendo never could. 

MD Engine is a new game development engine designed to make creating games on the Sega Mega Drive (aka the Sega Genesis) much easier. The engine, which uses visual scripting and a drag-and-drop interface to simplify the game development process, eliminating the need to be an expert in coding for the console. As such, budding game creators and veterans alike will (hopefully) be able to quickly and easily turn their ideas into 16-bit Blast Processed homebrew games.

While MD Engine is designed for game dev newbies, power users can still use the engine to code games in C. MD Engine also supports plugins and can export games as a traditional ROM file (compatible with both emulators and real hardware), an HTML5 web page, or ROMs that can run on Windows or in Steam. These last two export options also support modern features like widescreen support and the removal of sprite limits.

MD Engine was forked from GB Studio, a drag-and-drop development platform for the Nintendo Game Boy. MD Engine differs from GB Studio in a few ways; primarily, the Sega-focused development studio adds support for tiled maps in addition to images for scene backgrounds, multiple scripts for triggers, and "Setup/Update/End" scripts for scenes. 

Currently, MD Engine only supports game development for the Sega Genesis. Support for the Sega 32X and Sega CD may come later, but the studio is currently focused on the base Genesis/Mega Drive console. 

MD Engine is available for download through Steam. It is available on Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11 and has been tested on Linux Mint. Hardware requirements to run the studio are minimal: a single-core 1 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and 300 MB of storage space is enough to run the program. Recommended specs include a dual-core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and an SSD. A discrete GPU is "not required." MacOS is not yet supported. 

You can find out more about MD Engine via the link below.