LÖVE

Jasoco wrote:I've added the beginnings of a 2-player mode where you can control both characters at once. I might add up to 4 at some point, but for now 2 will be enough to play with. Since I want this engine to be versatile, I want to be able to have the option to do anything. Want it to be a Zelda or RPG? There it is. Want it to be an arcade style 2-player collect-a-thon game or something like Bomberman? There it is.

Be careful though. If your engine becomes too general, its usefulness for specific game types will decrease.

Robin wrote:

Jasoco wrote:I've added the beginnings of a 2-player mode where you can control both characters at once. I might add up to 4 at some point, but for now 2 will be enough to play with. Since I want this engine to be versatile, I want to be able to have the option to do anything. Want it to be a Zelda or RPG? There it is. Want it to be an arcade style 2-player collect-a-thon game or something like Bomberman? There it is.

Be careful though. If your engine becomes too general, its usefulness for specific game types will decrease.

I'm trying to be. I mean what if it's very customizable? I used to use Power Game Factory. An engine written in RealBASIC designed to make side scrollers. But it wasn't as customizable as it should have been, while at the same time people were trying to male it do things it wasn't designed for. Including top-down games, which made no sense at all. It also had no robust scripting system either and has since become supposedly abandoned and stale. I paid $44 for it. I also paid $25 for TNTBasic, which was much more limited than Löve and even more limited than QBASIC. It lacked basic things including file read and write. And it's tile map editor was primitive. It too eventually became stale, abandoned and eventually open-sourced.

I want to create an engine for myself that I can use to make whatever type of top-down game I desire.

Oh, that's all right, I was just referring to this curve: Just don't get to close to the tipping, all right?

I think the real danger is that by adding too many features code becomes hard to use and unmaintainable. Customizable code usually means giving the user room to work rather than trying to do everything for them.

I've been toying with the idea of creating an engine that can be used for both top and side views. The basic requirements for each are pretty much just tile-based maps, control mapping (take away up/down for side-scrollers), box based collision and some simple menus. This is a really general and loose guideline (for example, you don't just take away up/down, you could have aim up/crouch etc, jumping would be vastly different), but if the engine was designed well enough it would be capable of being used for something like Mario or Zelda or Final Fantasy.

That said, you seem to be going for a more specific top-down element. I think you should take some time to write down your ideas and make some decisions so that you don't end up with too many features and obsolete functionality, as people have suggested. I would make a list of all the common mechanics involved in the games you specified as an example and implement those. Stuff like obtainable items/power-ups, statistics for characters (how fast they move, what AI patterns they follow, health etc), score counters, specifiable level or world-based game flow. Once these basic things are available and people can play around with it, you can also see how people use it and expand on that. Crowd-source, heh.

Also, you mentioned that you want to have this engine for your own use, then I would break your ideas for that down and first build those things into the engine. You'd be surprised at the number of uses of your basic elements that people will come up with

What I want is to just get a basic framework. Not a super awesome RPGMaker competitor. But a framework that can be used as a starting point mainly by me but also available for other people who want to make top-down games like this but want to save some time creating the main framework.

Hi,

I downloaded the demo on page 27 and got these errors when launching it:
What am I doing wrong?

It's for an old version of LÖVE.

You can easily fix this, but other problems might crop up that are not that easily fixable.

To fix this particular error message, change the part of the first line of main.lua that says "game/engine.lua" to "game.engine". More replacements of the same pattern are probably needed.

Yeah. This is an oooooolllld project. I don't even remember anything from it and my coding techniques have changed drastically since then. I think this one requires 0.7.something but who knows which one.

I do plan on going back to it though at some point. I forgot how much I liked how this one looked. But not until I clear my head. Been working too much on the 3D engine that I burned myself out for now and have been playing Minecraft to recharge. One day. One day.

Damn, looking at that screenshot makes me remember how much I loved this engine. I really should go back to it. This one even had 2 player. And using techniques I've learned since I could probably make it split-screen.

Also, god I hate TinyPic. I wish I'd known back then that they like to reuse image URL's if you delete your images. It's silly viewing old posts that now have random unrelated images in them. I'm just glad none of them have been porn so far.

So I guess that's why it hasn't been used much in other projects (as far as I can see). Thanks for the replies!