Future engine/library/toolkit highlights for the blog
I'm going to be doing some more highlights over the coming days, and I'm making this post to keep track of what engines and tools I'm planning to highlight, and also get suggestions from the community for addtional ones.
Here's what I'm considering so far:
- Frogatto (done)
- Pygame
- Tiled (the tile map editing tool) (done)
- SDL
- SFML
- BrowserQuest
- Qt-QML
- The Mana World
- Love2d
- Allegro
- Gosu
- LWJGL
- AESPRITE
I'll add more as I think of them. If you know of any other engines, libraries, or tools that would be helpful for game development in LPC, please let me know and I'll add them to the list. Note that for me to highlight a particular thing, it needs to be production ready, which is why I'm not including my own project (Orange) on the list. It also needs to be suited to making top-down, non-isometric games.
Also, it would be particularly helpful if someone can get me in touch with the developers of some of these projects (particularly Qt-QML and BroswerQuest).
Thanks!
Bart
Hi Bart,
I believe you can easily get in touch with Thorbjorn Lindeijer (Tiled's Author) by coming on the freenode server #tiled channel.
A project which is production ready, open-sourced licensed as for the engine, is the solarus engine:
(A zelda full-fledged SDL engine with a quest editor) + its own quest (unfortunately using the original closed-source files, at least for now).
http://www.solarus-games.org/
Also, as you added Browser Quest, maybe you'll want to add the TMW project, which is open-sourced tools and has got a good community of players.
http://themanaworld.org/
I hope also to soon be able to tell you more about my own project. ;)
Best regards,
Bertram
I wouldn't count Flare in for non-iso games for the Liberated Pixel Cup. I doubt I can make that a priority betwen now and July 1.
However, I might decide to use Flare to make a contest entry. If so, Flare could end up having ortho support by the end of the contest. Depending on how ambitious I want to get with the contest.
Allegro is a dedicated game making library that's really nice(C/C++) :)
So is Gosu which is for C++ and ruby, and, imo, far superior to rubygame.
Might want to include Love2D..
My project: Bits & Bots
Thanks!
Keep the suggestions coming (I was actually already planning on writing up Love2d, I just forgot to add it to the list).
Novashell, open source, lua based:
http://www.rtsoft.com/novashell/
Looking at their screenshots, it should be quite good for doing rpg game.
There's always Ren'Py, while mainly used to make visual novels, it can be easily extended to build out games. I've always wanted to make an RPG based on it. It's written in Python/Pygame and has been proven to be easily extended to add in minigames.
I think it's under the MIT license, with some LGPL components.
http://www.renpy.org/
Blender game engine?
Red warrior needs caffeine badly.
LWJGL (Minecraft uses this)
jMonkeyEngine?
I'd rather avoid highlighting engines that would have to be shoehorned into 2D support. :)
Hi. What are your thoughts about Solarus? It's not in the list yet.
Actually, I've used LWJGL for only 2d stuff, PokeNet was one such game, and if you google for "LWJGL" (Or look at their website), you'll see that most games are 2D Shmups.
As for jMonkey, a friend of mine is working on a 2.5d game that uses 2d sprites on a 3d map, so it is possible to use Sprites, but as you said, it's "shoehorned" :P
Since you have Tiled on the list, another interesting tool is aseprite, a sprite and pixel art editor:
http://aseprite.org/
I'm thinking about using http://cocos2d.org/
EasyRPG Editor generates XML maps, still WIP:
https://github.com/EasyRPG/Editor
EasyRPG Player is still not implementing this map file format yet.
Game Baker could be a viable option, even though it hasn't been updated since 2009. I don't know if it still works though.
Box2D?
Bullet?
@Anon: It's fine if people enter the contest using WIP tools, but I'm not going to highlight them. :)
@tekk: Show me some screenshots of the editor in action and convince me that it's production ready. Given the screens on the homepage, I'm not convinced.
@Zael: I'm not sure how relevant physics is to a 2D top-down game. A side-scroller, sure. If someone can make a good argument for it, I'll include them.
Just basic collision detection. Granted, it does depend a lot on the game made. If you make the game tile based, then it isn't necessary. Collision detection just involves testing if something is already in the tile. Anything that isn't using tiles, but requires collision detection would greatly benifit from a physics library (if for nothing else than the automatic spatial partitioning involved). Maybe something like OZCollide is better since it focuses purely on the collision detection. Just because a game is 2D doesn't mean it doesn't use physics or good collision detection. Just look at Angry Birds or Gun Bros for an obvious example of a (relatively) simple 2D game that uses a good amount of physics.
If the contest wants to stipulate that certain types of game be made, instead of just seeing what the developers create using the art, then that's one thing, but if the contest wants to see all manner of interesting games I feel a physics library is almost essential, and it would be a disservice to have an official library list that did not include at least 1 physics library.
This isn't the official library list. It's just a list of libraries that are particularly appropriate. The official library list will be larger, and will include physics libraries.
There's also the Adonthell RPG engine:
http://adonthell.nongnu.org
What do you think of that?
Maybe the ToME 4 engine for roguelikes. If I recall correctly, there's even a Tiled plugin for that engine, so mapmaking would be easy.
http://te4.org/
Some of the ToME developers are planning on participating and there is a tiled plug in as well as a hex version of the tiled plug in (though I'm not sure if it has official tiled support but we can dig it up for anyone wanting to do a hex game).
I'm not sure if the engine can handle real animations (yet) but we've talked about it a bit in IRC so the possibility does exist (though it may end up requireing a compile from SVN rather then an official engine release). It does have engine support for particles, dialogs, quests, parties, using the mouse, and a lot of other very modern features that people probably wouldn't associate with a roguelike. Someone's recently put together a template JRPG module as well (though I haven't checked it out here's a link describing the features... http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=33704&hilit=rpg )
There's also support for learning T-Engine on irc.rizon.net #tome . Myself and the other developers hang out there as well as many module and add-on makers who are familiar with the code base. We'd be happy to help out anyone that would like to use T-Engine.
For something completely different, I think Ren'py could work. It's a tool for making Visual Novels or related games using Python.
If I have time to join, I'll probably use an old open source browser (non-html5) tactics rpg engine I created called HTMLTactics: http://sourceforge.net/projects/htmltactics/ . It works with tiled graphics, and has some decent features, but it has almost no documentation and requires knowledge of javascript to use (the database and map events have to be written in javascript, but the map editor has a decent UI). I was going to make a much cleaner version of it that included the old renderer and a html5 canvas renderer, but I never finished that version.
I see no HTML5 libraries? I suggest easeljs: http://www.createjs.com/#!/EaselJS They don't say it's open source, but if you go to the documentation all the files are there.
I used Jawjs for my recently finished HTML5 game. It's pretty good. I had to put in IE mouse support, which I gave the patch for to the author just yesterday.
I also used the Tiled map editor. It can output to JSON.
http://jawsjs.com/
http://www.mapeditor.org/