Falconet - Made with Tilengine

[Daniel H.]

Greetings Tilengine community!

I wanted to share some work I have been doing using Tilengine. It's a game called Falconet which is currently under development.

The alpha build gameplay footage was recently featured on tilengine.org (thanks megamarc!). Check it out here: https://youtu.be/vpKXPO_U6uI

You can also engage with the community over on Discord to get updates as development progresses: https://discord.gg/uNFek2GHyb

Some concept art


And a screenshot



Let me know your first impressions. Looking forward to your feedback!

[megamarc]

Hi Daniel!
How's your Falconet project progressing? It looks promising and fun to play.
Keep the good work,

[Daniel H.]

Hi Marc,

We are making steady progress. Thanks for asking! I'll start posting more updates on this thread. For now, you can take a look at our latest devlog:

https://youtu.be/Iprip9oDBYs

[Daniel H.]

Hi everyone!

We are excited to announce that the first playable demo has been released. Head over to itch.io to download and try out Falconet https://irukasoftware.itch.io/falconet

We look forward to receiving your feedback 

[megamarc]

Hi!
I've tried your demo. Good work! It plays great 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the map a closed square that can't be escaped? I can't get to any exit, there are invisible walls along all the perimeter.

Some advices as the engine developer:

• The life bar on the left side gets occluded by enemies that pass over it. Sprites on the GUI should have priority flag set with sprite.set_flags(Flags.PRIORITY) so they appear above anything else
  
• You can use ResourcePacker (https://megamarc.itch.io/resourcepacker) to protect your assets, packaging and encrypting them, and use Engine.open_resource_pack("your_package.bin") to load them seamlessly as if they were stand-alone files.
  
• I see you're using classic .txt files for sprite asset descriptor. It works well, but Tilengine also load .json files exported with TexturePacker (https://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker). It may be interesting for your team to use this tool to automate sprite packaging instead of maintaining by hand a lot of small, independent assets.
  

That's all!

Keep the good work and let me know if you need some assistance.

[Daniel H.]

Hi Marc,

Thanks so much for the feedback!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is the map a closed square that can't be escaped? I can't get to any exit, there are invisible walls along all the perimeter.

Yes, there is no exit. If you progress all the way to the bottom right of the map, you should find 2 enemy structures. Once those are destroyed, you win the game 

The life bar on the left side gets occluded by enemies that pass over it. Sprites on the GUI should have priority flag set with sprite.set_flags(Flags.PRIORITY) so they appear above anything else

 
We will definitely sort this out in future releases. There are a number of small things like this we wanted to fix before the first playable release, but we wanted to get something playable out as soon as we could.

You can use ResourcePacker (https://megamarc.itch.io/resourcepacker) to protect your assets, packaging and encrypting them, and use Engine.open_resource_pack("your_package.bin") to load them seamlessly as if they were stand-alone files.

 
I was actually looking for a reasonable way to do this and every other solution I looked at seemed like way too much work. So I will most certainly take a look a this tool.

I see you're using classic .txt files for sprite asset descriptor. It works well, but Tilengine also load .json files exported with TexturePacker (https://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker). It may be interesting for your team to use this tool to automate sprite packaging instead of maintaining by hand a lot of small, independent assets.

This will make our lives so much easier!

Really appreciate your input. It helps to have a Tilengine expert give feedback

[megamarc]

Happy to help with your project!

I've recently released 2.9.x, that features world mode that eases synchronisation of parallax layers and sprites, maybe it can be applied to your project. I've also updated the Python binding to this latest release.

Let me know any issue you may encounter!

[Daniel H.]

Great, good to know. Will will be making use of the parallax layers later on in development. And the updated Python bindings will help a lot too!

[Daniel H.]

New Falconet devlog video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8GeoPmyV8Q

[megamarc]

Thanks for sharing your progrees!
Classic bounding box for collision detection? I think pixel accurate would be overkill in this scenario, as sprites are fairly regular in shape.
Keep it up!