Sorry your browser is not supported!

Hey guys,

throughout the last months I've more or less constantly been working on an "engine", or rather a set of libraries which are quite handy when developing 2D games in DBPro. Among them is a tilemap handler, a culling library (sort of quad-tree like), shader effects, lighting, particles, camera behaviour and stuff like that.





I'm not sure if this is a proper WIP post as it's not really a single project I'm trying to finish, but rather a set of functions that I keep reusing over and over for all the games I make.

Anyway, I compiled a video demonstrating many of the effects using a simple tech demo as well as two of the games I made for game jams last year: The King's Profit, a pseudo 8-bit exploration game I developed together with xCatalyst (who created all the sprites as well as the game's amazing soundtrack) - we made it within 48 hours for Indie Speed Run and it even was voted to be one of the finalists - and Animal Liberation Turbo, a stealth game I made for last year's Charity Game Jam. Both are very different in their art design, but using much of the same code.

Everything in this video was made in DBPro. I used several plugins, most notably Advanced Sprites, Advanced 2D, Image Kit and d3d Func.

There's obviously still enough room for improvement - for instance tree shadows moving with the sun during the day/night cycles, or general anti-aliasing, and of course better textures and animations. However, looking back at my creations just 18 months ago I'm really quite satisfied.

Let me know what you think - and if there's anything that totally needs to be added.

Well; I would imagine your work to be one of the best 2D engines I have seen. I could not use inverted commas when describing the work as a game engine because I see it as a system designed for building and running video games.

There are placeholders in the demonstration which are so obvious to me that I am able to see the potential of the engine, whilst overlooking the assets themselves; although some guys look at the assets and critique such things rather than what is ones current focus, the engine. I hope this principle is much clearer for your observers than it has been for some who fail to see the big picture.

The video game in the demonstration looks really good, where can I see more of that?

Yes indeed, especially the first half of the video is full of placeholders. Maybe I should have mentioned that somewhere.



Both games from the video are available on my Website. There's also a playthrough video of the second one on my Youtube Channel. No video of The King's Profit yet.

That was the question I was gonna ask! Really great work and web site ShellfishGames, I'm following this!

It's about time you did something like this to show off your stuff! Excellent overview of everything, hopefully great things ahead

By the way, people that want to see more about TKP as one of the finalists for Indie Speed Run, you can go here as well as shell's website.

We were Trent Oster's pick (He is the man behind the Baldur's Gate series)

Wow, that's great. King's Profit looks really good.
Don't know what else to say, keep it up