Serpent Is an Open-Source Game Framework Focused on 2D Games

Serpent demo

If you’ve been wondering what happened to ex-Solus leader Ikey Doherty, he has a new company called Lispy Snake that creates an open-source and cross-platform game framework called Serpent.

Written in the D programming language, Serpent is an easy to use and cross-platform gaming framework that aims to help indie game developers create astonishing, retro video games that would work on Linux, Android, and Windows.

It’s made for indie game developers by an indie game developer.

For now, Serpent is focused on the creation of 2D video games that are compatible with today’s most used technologies, including Vulkan, OpenGL, DirectX, Metal, and Wayland. At its core, the game framework uses open-source technologies like bgfx and SDL.

“We want to disguise the pipeline under a 2D front. This framework is currently designed for 2D games, that benefit from an accelerated 3D pipeline. To that end, we’ll make it possible to make awesome 2D games with UIs, sound, tiling, etc. But you can still get slick bloom shaders…”

While Serpent is still under heavy development, Ikey Doherty worked hard during the past few months to add all sort of enhancements to the open-source game framework, including Tiled support for rendering data layers for orthographic tilemaps, sprite rendering, and an orthographic camera implementation.

All the technical details about the new goodies that landed in Serpent recently can be found in this post by Ikey Doherty.

But that’s not all. In the coming months, Serpent will get support for animated tiles, OpenAL sound support, better resource loading, Wayland integration, Vulkan improvements, as well as many other optimizations and fixes.

If you’re curious to see what Serpent can do, don’t hesitate to visit its GitHub page, where you can get the latest source and compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Besides Serpent, Ikey Doherty’s Lispy Snake also aims to deliver awesome 2D retro video games, but like most Open Source projects, they need the community’s help to accelerate the development.

A lifetime license that gives you access to all of their upcoming games actually sounds pretty cool, so do check out the official website for more details on how you can help.

Image: Lispy Snake

Last updated 4 years ago

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