A 2D game engine. Write games in Kotlin and run them as a standalone applications or inside a web browser.

Goal

Make writing games easy (ish) and fun.

I want to cater to the missing middle-ground between the novice-friendly Scratch and the powerful, but daunting Godot.

Structure

As with most game engines, there is a built-in editor where you set up the resources that your games needs, in a tree-structure, with Game being at the root of the tree.

Class names use theatre metaphors. (This game engine is named after the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Kyd)

A game consists of Acts. The first act might be a menu. Click the play button to start the next Act.

An Act is composed of many Stages, stacked one on top of another. Simple games may only need 1 stage.

A Stage is populated by Actors and each actor has a Behaviour. Behaviour is where most game-logic resides.

Each actor has an Appearance, in many cases this will be a simple Graphic (loaded from a .png file). To animate the actor, change the actor's Appearance each frame.

The classes Game, Actor, Appearance, and Stage are all pre-defined. In some cases you cannot create subclasses, and for the others you could, but probably won't. This is a deliberate design choice (to meet the easy and fun! goal).

If Behaviour governs the be behaviour of a single Actor, where does the remaining game-logic live? There are two interfaces Director and Management.

A Director is in charge of a single Act. It is created at the start of the Act, and destroyed when the Act ends. For example, if you have to collect N objects to win, Director will keep track of the counter, and when it reaches the goal, it will start the next Act.

Management is in charge of the game as a whole. It is created when the program starts and is never destroyed. This is often quite dull, because Behaviour and Director handle all the fun game-logic.