Show HN: Games123.net, games with homemade 2D engine
games123.net
Years ago I had some spare time and was working on a small infotainment game that started growing and getting more and more complicated. I eventually replaced the graphics library I was using with my own graphics lib, then I started adding more effects such as particles and so on. Pretty soon I noticed that I was getting tired of doing everything in code and wanted to make the whole thing more data driven so I started working on a small editor.
Today that whole project has grown into a homemade 2D game engine/editor project that has:
* Editor capable of producing complete games from start to finish. * Complete workflows for importing content and producing game packages for Windows/Linux and HTML5/WASM. * Scripting support with Lua and C++. * Entities, scenes, materials, animations, audio graphs, tilemaps, UIs * A ton of other features you might expect from an engine..
The targets of this game engine are small independent single person 2D games such as puzzle games and side scrollers. There's plan to add some limited 3D content support but that's still very much WIP. Tilemap support is also there but a little bit too much WIP since I got side tracked into isometric tiles which is a real PITA.
This has been a long project and has taken me 5 years to get to this point but things are slowly becoming together and finally the engine is capable of supporting making complete games without hitting too many missing features. There are of course still plenty of limitations and features that I want to have like 3D content importing, lights and shadows, fluid simulation and improved particle effects etc.
Many long nights have been spent pouring over the code and hammering away working on this and often I have wondered my own metal well being for taking on such a large project. That being said I feel like I'm well on my way and I don't see any reason to stop now.
While the domain for games, game tools and game engines is fully saturated there's probably still space for one more hobbyist engine. In terms of feature comparison to other similar engines I feel like I'm quite close to GDevelop. The graphical fidelity is not quite there yet, the goal is somewhere around early 2000.
Today i wanted show my site https://games123.net where I have a demos and games made with my engine. I feel like the best way to promote an engine is to show a game, so here we go.
The engine itself can be found on GitHub. https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator
Comments and feedback welcome.