About Ethanon Engine

Ethanon Engine is a free and cross-platform 2D game development tool focused on the recent video cards for hardware acceleration and shader effects. Any game style is allowed, from top-down view RPGs to side scrollers and shoot'em up games. The main goal is to provide high-quality lighting, shadow and particle effects with an easy to use visual interface, simple and direct scripting environment.

Entirely based on classical 2D sprites, Ethanon Engine uses pixel shaders to perform normal map based lighting and supports many sorts of map design (e.g.: isometric, orthogonal, hexagonal) since it relies on arbitrarily positioned entities instead of fixed tiles.

Game flow is controlled by the AngelScript language, which brings familiar Java/C#/C++ syntax to gameplay scripts.

The engine source-code is released under the MIT open source License.

Engine goals

• Highly scriptable
  Letting the developer code his way through game mechanics in an imperative way encourages the creation of innovative elements. The way the scripting language is bound to the core engine allows highly customizable events that couldn't be so easily achieved in a more declarative environment.
  
  
• Familiar language
  Good game programmers know C++ (at least we think they should). The Ethanon's AngelScript language provides a comfortable and familiar scripting environment for intermediate C++, Java or C# developers. AngelScript packs convenient high level features such as garbage collection and polymorphism while allows lower level and imperative optimizations when necessary.
  
  
• Keep it simple, classic and epic
  We love classical 16-bit arcade games, who doesn't? Ethanon Engine allow us to make games like those ones we always loved, based on simple 2D sprites driven by key-frame animations, no fanciness at all (except for the lighting system, of course).

• Quick start guide