A free cross platform game development engine
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About

luxe is a lovingly handcrafted free, open source cross platform rapid development game engine for deploying games on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and Web.

take note!

luxe development is currently in alpha. This is important because it means there may be bugs, inconsistency, incomplete implementations and API changes. It is still considered fairly usable, you'll find examples of that below.

Please be aware there is a major transition happening,
all the details of which are expanded in the development logs.

Development

All the latest development news is always posted here on this blog.
There are currently two forms of development updates:

development - In depth development posts
status - Status updates

Community

Please read the community conduct page before getting involved.

All development questions, discussions, bugs and issues are welcome and should be posted on the support repository – This allows everyone to find them in one place. If you have any questions, or have run into an issue, please feel free to post it. That's what it's for!

You can also find help and friends on the community chat.

Getting started

view setup guide

view luxe user guide

view API reference

Quick look

var player = new Sprite({  
    texture : Luxe.resources.texture('assets/player.png'),
    pos : Luxe.screen.mid,
    depth : 4
});

Development

Currently development is centered on finishing luxe 1.0.0. The focus is placed heavily on being a strong 2D engine first along with good stability, plus a fluid and iterative workflow.

Since the engine is built on top of a regular rendering pipeline, 3D is easily possible but a lower priority for the first version.

Design Philosophy

luxe is designed with numerous fundamental design choices – as you would expect – although there are some key ones that make it differ in ways that will influence assumptions when using it. Below briefly mentions some of these to make it easier to understand the goals of the engine.

luxe is a facilitator
The engine supplies and supports common patterns for making games, like Components/Entity systems, State Machines and Events messaging systems. These are not enforced and do not stop you from doing your own thing, bypassing those in favour of your own specific methodology or game specific architecture.

luxe is minimalistic in core and design which means that application/game specific domain features are left up to libraries and the application itself. It might not supply every feature you need for your specific game, but it will make it very easy to get there quickly. Therefore, luxe contains many helpers in functions and systems for you to use when building your games.

A rough brief overview of how the engine is designed is below. Click to enlarge.

Features

Short list and focuses

Open - Free and Open Source, under the MIT license
Approachable - high pace through an expressive, easy to use API.
Rapid Fits jam games and long form projects alike.
Documentation - continuous focus on documenting with high standards
Audio - OpenAL/WebAudio backed portable audio API
Rendering - WebGL spec based API, same code on all platforms
Portable - written to be ported, supporting new platforms is simpler
Input - Low level, immediate, event based OR high level API for Gamepad, Touch, Keys and Mouse

gameplay

Scene - simple scene container management
Collision - SAT collision query for shapes and rays
Physics - third party framework hooks, i.e nape.
Transforms - stackable transforms for positioning/rendering
Timing - control over time scale, per entity fixed rates and more
Timer - schedule functions and events into the timeline
Audio - simple to use but flexible audio api

Rendering

Sprite - visual backed class with animation, flipping etc
Color - handle HSV, HSL, RGB interchangeably
Render - automatic or self managed batching of geometry
Render control - flexible depth, blending and group rendering
OpenGL - direct or indirect access to WebGL spec API
Shaders - first class citizen, built into the core of rendering
Camera - split views, focus, rotation, shake, etc built in
Tilemaps - isometric, ortho support, with import from Tiled
Drawing - easy style shape/geometry drawing API
NineSlice - for scaling of assets like UI elements
Particles - simple particle support for quick effects
Textures - easy to use texture api, fully supports render to texture
Fonts - BMFont based bitmap font rendering

systemic

Assets - cross platform access to assets
Maths - support for Vector, Matrix and Quaternion based maths
States - modal, transient and stacked state machine
Events - expressive filterable local or global events
Components - modular code (behaviour composition)
Structural - common data structures link
Tweening - customized Actuate built in
Utils - many geometrical and game related utilities
Parcel - control preloading, loading/unloading parcels of assets

games

Even though luxe is in alpha, people have released a number of games already. From jam games to full releases, here are a few games you will find around.
Since there are numerous games, only a small selection are listed in no particular order.

The Westport Independent

Released on Mac, Windows, Linux (Steam, GOG), Android (Play, Amazon), iOS
Visit the website for full details

Topsoil

Released on iOS and Android with a web based demo.
Visit the website for full details

Operator Overload

Greenlit for release on Steam for Mac, Windows and Linux
Visit the website for full details

Rise

Released on Steam as part of HELP: THE GAME bundle
Visit the website for full details

QWOP (WebGL)

Released as a port to WebGL to support more players (originally in Flash)
Visit the website for details and to play

THREES (WebGL)

Released as a port to the web platform (originally in Unity)
Visit the website for details and to play

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