LÖVE

The problem I had was that my artistic requirements were not met by any existing (integrated) tools. For example, most level editors work on a square grid of tiles - a topology my designs don't conform to. It's not so much NIH as it is, well, Not Invented Yet.

I'm hoping to make the resulting engine available to all, in the spirit of democratization of creativity. But that's... years away. Most people here I'd assume are single devs like me. Like Ross said, it's hard enough to make a game, let alone a comprehensive suite to making games.

I've been working on one for about two months now, made a lot of progress (though at the moment I'm refactoring code, simplifying, and expanding, as well as working on getting more screen real estate for certain areas, etc).

https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=92187

I've done similar stuff years ago, and so I'm bringing in a lot of what I've learned through the decades for this, doing game coding way back in the late 90's using C++ and Allegro (and QBasic before that), and the various iterations of something *like this*.

Oh, and it doesn't use tilemaps for backgrounds (eg, the grid based thing you're talking about). It just uses png backgrounds for layers.

Screenshots in that thread are already outdated, since I've tweaked the tools a bit.

I've been working on one for about two months now....I've done similar stuff years ago, and so I'm bringing in a lot of what I've learned through the decades for this

Yes it is pretty neat and the fact this is not your first attempt and you are putting 30+ years of experiences in to this is reassuring. Glad I am not the only one who get things right after a million attempts only while others program operating systems at the age of 12 and become a billionaire at the age of 21

I like the idea of the plugin architecture you mentioned in the topic so we can extend the engine with Lua and make anything even platformer games not only jRPG. Sounds interesting, also being written in Lua and powered with Love2D is inspiring.

I'm going to keep an eye on it, I like to experiment with different game engines just for fun.
Since it seems people agree on that this community is not that interested in engines and editors, make sure you also post about it on other game dev forums and social media. You could start a Dev log on itch.io and maybe even release some demos showcase what the engine is capable of, even if only that much at this point to control a character and enter houses....

Good luck.

LOL well, 20+! Don't age me another 10 years...I'm old enough already, hah

Glad you like it! And I completely get why they're not interested in engines and editors. It's why I use Love2d, tbh, I'm not interested in using other people's engines and editors either, hah. But, hey, I figure this might be useful to other people, and really it's eventually going to be usable by non-Love2d coders (at least that's the hope).

I do plan on doing an itch devlog too. And it's going to be on github, as well as have several example packages for people to look through and either use for their own games, or use for inspiration on how to do certain things. After toying around with GB Studio, I realized most people take the examples, and then modify them for their own games, which is great. So I want to do the same thing, making the examples open source as well with a very permissible license.

I'm not ready to do all that yet, though. I want to be able to load/save/run a basic game in both the editor and the engine, and right now it's still a little bit away from that. It's okay, one step at a time, etc. Eventually there will be some demos. But not just yet.

(tbh, the lighting stuff I'm most excited about people using. Luven made it simple to add in, and most good Hi Bit games like Eastward, Owlboy, etc, have really cool lighting effects. This editor will make it really easy to just point and click and drop the lights down. No fuss, no muss. I don't see any other game engine or editor doing that at the moment)

grump wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 9:40 am

zorg wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 9:29 am more about "anti-your-structure" and "pro-their-structure"

a.k.a. NIH syndrome. It's not really a good thing. But I'm doing it too with love2d because, quite frankly, there's not that many good libraries. Most are substandard.

To be fair though, if i do find a library made by someone else that i can comfortably use, then i won't unnecessarily implement my own.