isongn

isongn (iso-engine)

What is it?

isongn is a cross-platform, open-world, isometric, scriptable rendering engine. We take care of disk io, graphics, sound, collision detection and map abstractions. You provide the assets, event handling scripts and the vision. Realize your old-school rpg/action-game dreams with easy-to-use modern technology!

Features

• High speed, smooth-scrolling, isometric rendering of 2D images
• Completely configurable rendering engine
• Map-size bound only by disk space and golang's int
• Simulated low-res, old-school video resolution
• Game control from script with built-in functions for movement, path-finding, etc.
• Date/time calendar with a daylight color cycle plus, weather effects
• Shader animations for vegeation, etc
• Animated shapes for creatures, etc.
• Truetype font and simple ui overlay rendering
• Map editor included (extendable via script)

Example games

• Enalim

The tech

For graphics, isongn uses opengl. Instead of sorting isometric shapes using the cpu, isongn actually draws in 3d space and lets the gpu hardware sort the shapes in the z buffer. It's the best of both worlds: old school graphics and the power of modern hardware.

isongn is written in Go with minimal dependencies so it should run on all platforms.

For scripting, isongn uses bscript. The language is similar to modern JavaScript.

How to use isongn

You can create games without writing any golang code. With a single config file and your assets in a dir, you're ready to set the retro gaming scene on fire!

Please see the User Guide for more info about how to make your own games.

Older screenshots

Here is a video of a previous version.

2021 (c) Gabor Torok, MIT License