The Driftwood 2D Tiling Game Engine and Development Suite is a game engine and related set of tools designed for the purpose of allowing a novice to develop a fully featured tile-based 2D game. Driftwood 2D is currently undergoing heavy alpha-stage development and should not be considered stable. API changes will occur frequently at this stage. However, it is currently suitable for making very simple exploration-style games.
The engine loads a world package made of images, sounds, maps, descriptive files, and scripts, and then passes itself to the scripts as an interface to its internal API. From there, the scripts in the world package interact with and control the engine to perform its functions, resulting in a playable game. All public functions in the engine are accessible through the scripts. Maps are designed in Tiled and saved in JSON format, and the engine config file and entity descriptor files are also written in JSON.
Current features include:
...and more on the way!
On Linux releases prior to Alpha-0.0.11, the source release contains everything necessary. Simply run make
in the top directory, and if all of your prerequisites are installed and the make completes sucessfully, you can run bin/driftwood
from the top directory to start the engine.
On Linux releases Alpha-0.0.11 and afterwards, the project has been split into subdirectories, which are not included in the source release zip. Instead, you can download the Linux binary release, and just run ./driftwood
in the top directory. For the source release, you must run git submodule init
and git submodule update
in the top directory, and then you can run make
and bin/driftwood
like before.
On Windows, simply download the Windows binary release and run Driftwood.exe
in the top directory, either through the command line or by double clicking. The Windows binary release ships with all of its prerequisites, so it should just work. Alternatively you can download the source release and run the Driftwood.bat
batch file, assuming you have installed all of the prerequisites manually.
On all releases, running the driftwood executable with the --help
option will present a list of command line options. You can select a game from the data directory by running with --path game-directory-name
.
A Linux binary release is made from source by running make release
, and is placed in the newly created release/
directory. Making Windows binaries is not currently documented, but we make them using using pyinstaller.
For development testing, you can run python3 src
from the top directory to run the engine from source without compiling.