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:
Direct Link
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.
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.
Quoting: MaathLooks 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.
noderunner Mar 6, 2020
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.
Quoting: MaathSince 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...
Kimyrielle Mar 8, 2020
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: MaathLooks 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
Quoting: KimyrielleI 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.Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: MaathLooks 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
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