Today thanks to a game developer, I was made aware of Solarus. It's a cross-platform free and open source game engine, that's designed for people making 2D action-RPGs.
Sounds actually quite good too. Using an engine is programmed in C++, with the SDL library and an OpenGL back-end. The actual games made with it they call "quests" and you make them with Lua, so the game engine does the majority of the heavy lifting for developers—that's the aim at least.
They even have their own cool overview video to show it off a little, and we all know how a little fancy marketing can go a long way:
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Direct Link
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For users, it comes with its own specialized launcher to play games made with it, the aptly named Solarus Launcher which you can grab as a Snap across many Linux distributions. Everything about it is cross-platform too with support for Linux, macOS, Windows, BSD, Android soon too.
Last month, they announced that Solarus Labs had been formed as a legally existing non-profit organization to give it some proper backing. To be clear, it remains free and open source but with the proper paperwork in place they can now properly and legally take donations for it.
Find out more on the official site.
I'll be speaking to a developer who is actually using it too in another article to come, so stay tuned for that.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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11 comments
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Looks like its other name is "Zelda Maker."
Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.
Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.
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Looks like its other name is "Zelda Maker."You've also got Kenney Assets.
Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.
3 Likes, Who?
I tried running that a few months ago, and found the controls wouldn't work properly at all. It runs, but I can't actually play anything.
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noderunner Mar 6, 2020
I've been playing and making games with Solarus for years. I highly suggest it for any aspiring game developers out there, just load up an existing game project in the editor and see how it was put together. It's pretty self explanatory to make your own game from there.
1 Likes, Who?
i tried it some time ago, and it didnt helped much, compared to starting from 0 in something like html5..
sure you had some features like an tile map editor, but even i can do that, most of the part you still had to do anyway...
so, i'm not willing to test it again so soon... i'm sticking with godot.
sure you had some features like an tile map editor, but even i can do that, most of the part you still had to do anyway...
so, i'm not willing to test it again so soon... i'm sticking with godot.
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I saw your gitlab issue Liam, thanks for that, I'd love having that on manjaro as well.
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Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.You're not wrong, but that's why you see so many lone developers and small teams doing retro-style graphics. It isn't just an affectation; there are only so many ways you can arrange pixels in a 16x16 grid, especially in a limited palette, and that makes things so much easier. Although I've never released anything, I've always tinkered with graphics (and audio, and code) since the 8-bit days, and I well remember how much more difficult - more like “real drawing” - the jump to 16 bits was. And that was before we had to worry about 3D modelling, normal mapping, lighting...
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Kimyrielle Mar 8, 2020
Looks like its other name is "Zelda Maker."You've also got Kenney Assets.
Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.
Kenney's stuff is super cartoony, and if you're anything like me and just HATE cartoon art, his stuff won't help much either. I am otherwise in the same boat. I got a few decades of coding experience, but I suck at art. The closest thing I have found to a universally usable starter set for RPGs is https://opengameart.org/content/dungeon-crawl-32x32-tiles
1 Likes, Who?
I think it's not an unusual situation. For instance, I've noticed that visuals is where a lot of open source games come up short.Looks like its other name is "Zelda Maker."You've also got Kenney Assets.
Since I was a kid I've always wanted to make video games. Too bad I'm not an artist. No matter how easy these engines make creating a game, the art assets will probably always be the major hurdle. Sure there's sites like opengameart.org, but that can get you only so far.
Kenney's stuff is super cartoony, and if you're anything like me and just HATE cartoon art, his stuff won't help much either. I am otherwise in the same boat. I got a few decades of coding experience, but I suck at art. The closest thing I have found to a universally usable starter set for RPGs is https://opengameart.org/content/dungeon-crawl-32x32-tiles
1 Likes, Who?
Just took another shot at Solarus, and gamepad support is still apparently non-functional. I tried "Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX", which claims to have gamepad support, but apparently it doesn't. After getting through the intro and hitting D (as quite a long search through forums finally told me to do), it gave me options to map my gamepat buttons.
Which...was non-functional. I tried Steam Controller, XBox 360 pad and a PS2 controller, and it didn't recognize inputs from any of them. As playing a Zelda-esque game with keyboard only sounds like pure torture, I'm going to call Solarus non-functional in terms of playing games.
I did find a forum post from last October that refers to some mysterious "software" application where joypad permissions are turned off, but there's really nothing that explains what that is or where to find it, which is utterly ridiculous.
Which...was non-functional. I tried Steam Controller, XBox 360 pad and a PS2 controller, and it didn't recognize inputs from any of them. As playing a Zelda-esque game with keyboard only sounds like pure torture, I'm going to call Solarus non-functional in terms of playing games.
I did find a forum post from last October that refers to some mysterious "software" application where joypad permissions are turned off, but there's really nothing that explains what that is or where to find it, which is utterly ridiculous.
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