oskaerik / gore-engine

A 2D game engine written in Java using Slick2D.

GORE Engine

What is GORE Engine?

GORE Engine is an easy to use 2D game engine written in Java using Slick2D.

How to use

Below are instructions on how to use the game engine.

Example

We think that our game example is the best way to learn. You can run the example by cloning the folder, opening a terminal in the gore-engine directory and typing java -jar example.jar

The source code for the example is included in the engines resources.

General

Settings

In the settings.txt-file, specify the width and height of the game window, the max FPS allowed and if debug mode should be enabled etc. The names of the fields are pretty self explanatory.

Start Screen and End Screen

In the folder res/startscreen, place a file called startscreen.png and a file called endscreen.png, the start screen is displayed before the game begins and the end screen is displayed when the player dies.

Rooms

Tiled

The program Tiled is used to create the maps. The maps are then placed in the folder res/rooms/. The name of the room is placed in the file rooms.txt in this folder like so:

Cutscene

In the rooms.txt file, the rooms can be put as this: center wizard And so on. Where the word "wizard" is in the above example, you can put the name of a character in the room that a cutscene should be triggered with when the player enters the room. The cutscene is a dialogue with the character, and uses the null dialogue of the character.

In the above example, a cutscene is triggered with the character wizard.

Characters

Animations

In the res/characters/ folder, create a folder for every character wanted in the game. The character player is obligatory.

Save the movement animations as .png-files and put them in the folder for the corresponding player. The movement animations should be named like:

• down-1.png
• down-2.png
• up-1.png

The needed directions for every character is up, down, left and right.

Dialogue

Add a file name dialogue.txt to every character and write what you want them to say.

The file should be formatted like this: null,Item1,Item2,Item3 null: What you want them to say when you haven't given them any items. You can keep typing on multiple lines to have more dialogue. Item1: What the character should say when you give the character Item1.

Movement

Place a file in the characters directory names movement.txt and format it as following:

For a character that should only stay still, you can have a file that looks like this:

1 S

This means the character will stay still for 1 millisecond and then it will restart.

For a character that should move, you could have a file that looks something like this:

1000 D
1000 L
1000 R
1000 U

This character will walk downwards for 1000 ms, then left, then right, then up, then repeat.

Placing characters in the world

Using Tiled, place a transparent tile on layer 3 and have the fields:

• CharacterType - This is either friend or enemy
• CharacterName - Name of the character, must match the name of the character's folder If you want more than one of the same character in the room, add a number to the end of the character's name. You could have characters like this:

CharacterName=enemy1
CharacterName=enemy2
CharacterName=enemy3

Items

Tiled

Items are placed using Tiled, place the items as transparent tiles on layer 2. The tile should have the field ItemName where the name of the item could be something line Sword or Chest.

Animation

Place the pictures for the animations that you want the item to have in the folder res/items/ like this: ItemName-1.png ItemName-2.png ItemName-3.png Where ItemName is the actual name of the item. If you don't want the item to have a moving animation, just place the first file in the folder. Be sure to name it ItemName-1.png though.

Exits

Tiled

Exits are placed on the layer 1 and have the fields:

• Exit String which should contain the name of the room the exit should lead to
• SpawnX and SpawnY String which should contain the spawn location you end up on

Blocked tiles

Tiled

Blocked tiles are placed on layer 1 in tiled and should have a boolean field called "Blocked" which should be set to true (should be ticked in Tiled).

It is important that the top left tile of every map is a blocked tiled, since the rendering of the map itself begins on that tile.

Projectiles

Animation

Projectiles are placed in the res/projectiles folder in a subfolder with the name of the projectile, e.g. fireball. Then the animation files are placed in this folder with the names:

fireball-1.png
fireball-2.png
fireball-3.png

And so on. Also place a hit animation like this:

hit-1.png
hit-2.png
hit-3.png

For when the projectile hits it's target.

Credits

• Slick2D: http://slick.ninjacave.com/
• OpenGameArt: http://opengameart.org/
• LWJGL: https://www.lwjgl.org/