Enter The Miniature Dragon Sunday, October 20, 2019 - Ikey Doherty (CEO) Engine Updates Releases

Man, have we been busy. Like, for real. In this post, we’ll introduce you to the name and mockups for our first title, as well as show you some open source goodness.

The Last Peacekeeper

This is the working title for our upcoming first game. We’ve done a whole lot of storyboarding and character development internally, and feel it’s time to show the world where we’re headed.

The Last Peacekeeper Titlescreen Mock-up.

Do note that as with all development, expect constant reiteration and improvement. As such, we’ve prepared a special landing page to keep you up to date with the core plan for the title.

In The Last Peacekeeper, the first game from Lispy Snake, you play as a bounty hunter bringing the galaxy’s most wanted to justice. That is, until a series of events forces you to confront some of the darkest forces in the universe - including your own demons. This game melds strategy, adventure, and RPG elements to create a gritty adventure that will bring you hours of captivating excitement. This game will break you, build you back up, and then break you again. The question is, do you have what it takes to be The Last Peacekeeper?

Read more on The Last Peacekeeper

Serpent

Cue absurd GIF with vague reference to what we’re talking about:

We’ve been hard at work on our engine for a while now, and with that came the somewhat obvious (yet still hard-hitting) realisation that creating engines just doesn’t make sense anymore. Considering how much custom logic would form the engine-proper within our games, making a generic game engine that reimplements the world just didn’t make a lot of sense.

That’s where Serpent comes in. Whilst it may be a young project right now, it does have some very sensible goals. In a nutshell, we’re looking exclusively to create a gaming framework, or “kit”. The README does a good job of explaining our design decisions - but this being a blog we’ll give you the basic laydown.

We wanted a safe, friendly language.

We love C - but avoiding heavy problematic dependencies means needlessly reimplementing the basics every time (ADT, refcounts, etc)

We also like the whole “string safety” and “UTF” thing.

We’re leveraging the best in class of open source libraries under one roof.

Reinvent only what needs reinventing.

To that extent - we’re writing Serpent in the D Programming Language or ‘D Lang’ as it is known. Note only does this offer us safety, but powerful compiler and runtime features, such as TMP, concurrency, etc. For our rendering, we’re using bgfx - supporting all major targets and technologies, including Vulkan. Internally this handles multithreading, drawcall ordering, etc.

We’re still using SDL for basic windowing, input management, etc. This affords us the advantage of the great controller support expected in the gaming world. Also on the planned integration list is OpenAL for audio, and potentially Newton Dynamics for physics.

The net result is going to be a gaming framework, in D, that drastically reduces time to market for 2D titles. We’re also going to make sure we use it in all the right ways, with parallel hotpaths in trusted native libraries. It’s a super exciting time here at Lispy Snake, and we can’t wait to make you part of the adventure.

FOSS All The Things

If you check out our Serpent - you’ll see a bunch of projects just appeared. Included is Serpent, as well as the old code from our investigative efforts into a C-based game engine It’s limited and relies on some hardcoding for demo purposes, but it serves as documentation for where we went wrong. TL;DR - pick your battles.

Most importantly, though, you’ll see serpent , serpent-support as public repos now. Our framework development will happen in the public eye - just please note we’re currently only focusing on Linux x86_64 targets and will heavily change our code daily.

Lastly

As previously indicated - we can spend more development time on these cool projects, and our game, if you support us.

To do that - buy a license today that will reward you with lifetime, free access, to all of our upcoming 2D titles. That’s pretty sweet, at only $20.