I've been silent for far too long, but not without making some progress. Starting with almost no existing source code left me with the large task of building a suitable game framework from scratch. Assets management, basic input processing, game object hierarchy, game clock, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention a trip down over engineering avenue with a component based system for game objects. In retrospect, I definitely should have just used a simple hierarchy based inheritance structure. (Although it is pretty sweet now that it works, I'll detail it in a future post).
But alas, I've finally arrived at a workable game framework. Below is an animation of the Player Actor (represented by the green circle) moving around the game scene complete with a simple physics controller and input processing.
So now, I can finally transition to working on the GAME part of the game.