Tag: Hands-On

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microStudio Game Engine Hands-On

microStudio is a game engine that runs entirely in your browser and makes it incredibly easy to get started creating 2D games, with a polished, well designed, comprehensive and documented set of tools. You can start as easily as going to microStudio.dev in your browser, clone an existing or create a new project and start coding, no account creation required.

Key features of microStudio include:

  • entirely browser based, no install or account creation required
  • simple Lua inspired programming language microScript
  • built in multi-file code editor with contextual documentation and syntax highlighting
  • run your game directly in browser or remote test on phones with live loading
  • pixel art editor
  • tile map editor
  • support for multiple devs with automatic synchronisation of changes
  • deploy your game as HTML5, or beta export support for Windows, Mac and Linux

You can learn more about microStudio and see in it action in the video below (or Odysee here). If you want to learn more or encounter a problem check out their discord server.

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Drag[en]gine Hands-On

The Drag[en]gine is a highly modular, open source (C++) game engine that has been under active development for several years. The Drag[en]gine’s modular approach is built around the GLEM concept breaking your game project into the Game Script, Launcher, Engine and Modules layers. The Game Script is implemented by default in Dragonscript, another open source project available here. Drag[en]gine is open source under the LGPL license on GitHub.

If you want to get started with Drag[en]gine you can download binaries for Linux and Windows available here, it’s most likely the IGDE file you want to start with. There are a number of samples to get you started available here. You can learn more about Drag[en]gine in the video below.

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Hands-On With Peek For Unity

In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.

Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:

  • Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
  • Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
  • Sticky drag and drop
  • Quick reference inspection
  • Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
  • Multi-object grouping

You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.

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Castle Game Engine Hands-On

The Castle Game Engine is a pretty unique option. It’s a long running open source 2D/3D game engine for Pascal and Delphi developers with a recent emphasis on improving the editing experience. Hand and hand with the Castle engine is the Lazarus IDE and the open source Pascal implementation Free Pascal, which are required for Castle game development.

Top features of Castle include:

  • Use any 3D or 2D software to create your models in various formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Spine JSON, Collada…
  • Develop cross-platform applications, for desktop (Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD…), mobile (Android, iOS), consoles (Nintendo Switch) and other devices (Raspberry Pi).
  • Visual editor to design games UI and to build applications, powerful command-line build tool under the hood.
  • Optimized rendering with a lot of graphic effects (physically-based rendering, shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, shader effects, gamma correction…).
  • Build and edit the scene graph (X3D) at runtime. Create 3D processing, visualization tools and CAD applications.
  • Extensible system for game objects, with physics, creatures with AI and navmesh, and more.
  • Access numerous services, like in-app purchases and game services on mobile devices.
  • Create cross-platform user-interface with anchors and automatic scaling.
  • Code in modern Object Pascal, an efficient OOP language with cross-platform open-source compiler (FPC), compiled to a native optimized code.

If you are interested in learning more about the Castle game engine be sure to check out the video below (or watch it here on Odysee). The Castle developers have also recently released a document making it easier for Unity developers to get up to speed with key concepts in Castle, which is available here. If you are interested in getting started with Castle and Lazarus, step by step instructions are available here.

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Clayxels — Bringing Clay Modelling and Claymation to Unity

Currently featured in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle as well as being 50% off on the Unity Asset Store, Clayxel is an asset that extends Unity to add support for modelling then animating clay-like 3D objects.

Clayxels is described on the Store page as:

Clayxels is an interactive volumetric toolkit to sculpt models in editor and in game. It uses voxels to generate a lightweight point-cloud that can be changed in real-time and used in a whole bunch of different ways, all without any heavy pixel ray-marching. Works both in editor and in game, everything made with clayxels can be changed interactively at any time.

Works with all render pipelines, built-in, URP, HDRP.

It is important to note that Clayxel currently *does not* support the WebGL targets. In the video below we go hands-on with Clayxel, give you an overview of it’s capabilities and show you a simple tutorial on how to get up and running creation clay objects in your Unity game. The Unity Humble Bundle runs until the end of September, so don’t miss out if Clayxel looks interesting to you. Another asset in the bundle, UModeler, was covered in an earlier GFS post. The above links contain an affiliate code that pays a small commission to GameFromScratch if used to purchase (and thanks so much if you do!).

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Echo Engine Hands-On

Today we are taking a look at the open source cross platform 2D/3D C++ based Lua-powered game engine Echo. While Echo is very much it’s own engine, it has a very Godot vibe in the way your game scene is organised, taking a node based approach to game development. The engine is released under the very permissive MIT open source license.

From the project GitHub page, Echo is described as:

Echo is a new game engine, which used more industry-standard of nowadays for game development. The new design concept makes the engine simplicity to use. but more powerful. Scene manager is easy, No Entiy, No GameObject, No Component, No Prefab. Only Node and NodeTree.

In the video below we go hands-on with this active open source project. In the later half of the video we show how you can build the engine on Windows, before you begin however you will need to have Visual Studio 2019 with C++ support and CMake installed on your machine.