My 2D Open-World Engine

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    • My 2D Open-World Engine

      Hello,

      Ive been recently working on a 2D game engine for Open-World adventure games. The core feature of the engine (and de facto its selling point) is the ability to program it with XML and Lua alone. The engine is still in its early Alpha version and there are yet a lot of things to be added (such as a proper interface, battle and inventory system, as well as trading).

      That being said, I have decided to create a simple demo game in order to test the features that are already implemented. The game is called The 8-Bit Encounter and it presents a simple (and quite honestly, kind of lame) story set on a fictional island. The players objective is to move around the world, explore different locations and talk to NPCs while progressing through a simple quest. Note that the story itself is not of much relevance, as it was created purely as an excuse to test various features of the engine in the state it is right now.

      I'm posting the announcement on this forum because a large part of my engine design was influenced by the book (EntityComponent System, ProcessManager, EventManager etc). I think sharing the game here could give me an opportunity to receive some broader feedback, while (hopefully) providing at least a couple of minutes of that nostalgic 2D RPG-like experience to those playing it. Therefore, if you find my project interesting enough to try it out, Id appreciate some feedback on just about anything related to the technical aspects of the game (and thus the engine itself).

      Thank you for your time and attention.


      [size=24pt]Alpha 0.3[/size]

      (Changelog between 0.2 and 0.3)
      • [FIXED] Collision detection wasn't sometimes accurate enough
      • [FIXED] Velocity for diagonal movement was too fast
      • [ADDED] Day and night cycle
      • [ADDED] "Interriors" with specific lighting can now be defined in the map editor
      • [ADDED] Cutscene mode for in-game scripted events (while in the mode, the dialogues can be skipped by pressing Enter)
      • [ADDED] Music fading functionality
      • [ADDED] In-game message boxes
      • [ADDED] In-game dialog boxes
      • [ADDED] Interactive menus
      • [ADDED] Multi-line dialogues
      • [ADDED] Splashscreen
      • [ADDED] Various adjustments to the tech demo





      DOWNLOAD INSTALLER
      OR DOWNLOAD .ZIP (REQUIRES VC++ 2013 REDISTRIBUTABLES)

      The post was edited 7 times, last by xor ().

    • Wow, I just want to say what a fantastic demo piece you have in the making here. Aside from the lack of features and some more polish you can really tell that you put attention to detail in the little things.
      PC - Custom Built
      CPU: 3rd Gen. Intel i7 3770 3.4Ghz
      GPU: ATI Radeon HD 7959 3GB
      RAM: 16GB

      Laptop - Alienware M17x
      CPU: 3rd Gen. Intel i7 - Ivy Bridge
      GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M - 2GB GDDR5
      RAM: 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 @ 1600mhz
    • Two things that automatically jumped out at me was the sound blasted me and I had to mess with the Windows app dependent volume sliders to get it reasonable compared to my music. The other is hitting two arrow keys (up and right, for example) moves faster than just one key. Not sure if that was intentional or not.

      Definitely a solid start. I'm interested to see what Rez thinks!
    • Originally posted by mholley519
      Wow, I just want to say what a fantastic demo piece you have in the making here. Aside from the lack of features and some more polish you can really tell that you put attention to detail in the little things.

      Thanks, I wanted to make it work flawlessly despite the fact it's an Alpha. Glad someone appreciates it.
      Originally posted by DieselMaxPower
      Two things that automatically jumped out at me was the sound blasted me and I had to mess with the Windows app dependent volume sliders to get it reasonable compared to my music. The other is hitting two arrow keys (up and right, for example) moves faster than just one key. Not sure if that was intentional or not.

      Definitely a solid start. I'm interested to see what Rez thinks!

      If the volume's too high, you can turn the sounds off with the -m run command.

      Hitting two arrow keys moves the entity with exactly the same velocity (code-wise). Perhaps it appears faster because the entity is moving in both directions at the same time (?)
    • Personally, I think while your Demo is certainly incomplete, it really shows that you put a lot of work into it.
      "I wish there was a combat system in this game".. This really got me :) I am really excited to see how you will continue this! Can't wait to play the final version!

      Some first impressions on what might be improved (I don't want to demoralize you or say you didn't do a great job- quite the opposite! I really like your demo and it was fun to play it. I just want to give you some constructive feedback so that you can improve it even further):
      -I think it gets a bit annoying that you always move so slowly. Just wandering around to explore the map tatkes a lot of time. Maybe you could increase the speed?
      Also concerning the speed:

      Hitting two arrow keys moves the entity with exactly the same velocity (code-wise). Perhaps it appears faster because the entity is moving in both directions at the same time (?)

      Technically speaking, if you move, say 10 pixels per frame in two directions, you are definitely moving faster than if you were moving 10 pixels in just one direction. So you move faster if you hit both keys. If you want to restrict the movement in such a way that you always move at the same speed, no matter how many keys are hit, you have to normalize your speed vector and scale afterwards.
      -I think I've seen some spelling mistakes. These should be corrected.
      -When installing, I think I didn't have a choice concerning which partition I want to install to. This is of course not too much of a problem, but it was a bit irritating (though that's probably just me wanting to arrange my stuff in some chaotic order :) ).
      -You might want to add the posibility to speed up dialogs. Like displaying the text faster if a certain button is pressed or something like that. As a person who usually reads quite fast, it is a little bit annoying to always wait for the dialogs to finish.

      Before I lose myself in more features that you could add, I'd better stop here. I know it's an early alpha, so there are still a lot of things you can add and probably have already planned. Anyway, I really enjoyed your demo and I am excited to see how you will extend it!
    • Originally posted by Dendra
      -I think it gets a bit annoying that you always move so slowly. Just wandering around to explore the map tatkes a lot of time. Maybe you could increase the speed?

      Thanks for the feedback. I will increase the speed in the next release, especially since this issue had been already brought up by other testers too. For now, you can increase the speed yourself, by editing it in the entities.xml file in the resources.zip directory. After all, this engine is all about being modding-friendly!
      Originally posted by Dendra
      Also concerning the speed:

      Hitting two arrow keys moves the entity with exactly the same velocity (code-wise). Perhaps it appears faster because the entity is moving in both directions at the same time (?)

      Technically speaking, if you move, say 10 pixels per frame in two directions, you are definitely moving faster than if you were moving 10 pixels in just one direction. So you move faster if you hit both keys. If you want to restrict the movement in such a way that you always move at the same speed, no matter how many keys are hit, you have to normalize your speed vector and scale afterwards.

      I'll definitely look into that for the next release.
      Originally posted by Dendra
      -When installing, I think I didn't have a choice concerning which partition I want to install to. This is of course not too much of a problem, but it was a bit irritating (though that's probably just me wanting to arrange my stuff in some chaotic order :) ).

      The installer just unpacks the folder to the desktop, so it's easily accessible to the testers. Apart from that, it also installs the VS redistributables (if necessary).
      Originally posted by Dendra
      -You might want to add the posibility to speed up dialogs. Like displaying the text faster if a certain button is pressed or something like that. As a person who usually reads quite fast, it is a little bit annoying to always wait for the dialogs to finish.

      I had been thinking about allowing players to skip dialogues. The thing is that in the game, multiple entities are allowed to talk at the same time (also, while performing other tasks), so I could do it only for the scripted events where I have a full control over the order of the dialogues (and where only one entity can talk at the same time).
      Originally posted by Dendra
      Before I lose myself in more features that you could add, I'd better stop here. I know it's an early alpha, so there are still a lot of things you can add and probably have already planned. Anyway, I really enjoyed your demo and I am excited to see how you will extend it!

      Thanks for the good words. Indeed, there are other features I have already lined up for implementation, the first one being a proper UI.