Serious Game Development Kit is the nickname I decided to give to a code base that I've been continually evolving from project to project. It's a development kit / code base focused around making all kinds of 2D games, currently supporting both cartesian and isometric. The name itself is not so much serious, but rather it is a play on words from the game Serious Sam.

Originally started as a level editor for Lamb Mines, it was largely non-functional and not completed in time, and as such never ended up being used for the project. I later gave new life to it and made it completely functional for Melvin the Marvellous Monster from Mars, and it was a major component of that project! The project was further expanded for use in Angry Angry Island, however it was not completed in time and never used. Then for my honours project at university during my winter 2012 term, I decided to revisit, gut and completely re-design the editor from scratch and add plugin support and networking to allow collaboration between any number of designers through a central server! I also got the idea to tie everything together into one nice, big re-usable package for various 2D game projects, so that there was a more standard library and set of file formats to use for future projects! The level designer is even fully backwards compatible for Melvin the Marvellous Monster from Mars and supports level files and sprite sheet definition files from this game!

The development kit is planned to have a number of different components including the following:

However, the only completed components in the development kit are the level designer and plugin libraries - none of the other components are finished. There are some legacy implementations of the different types of game development libraries, but most of them need work. The all-in-one editor for customizing the sprite sheet, animation, entity and plugin definition files is a fairly complex task and has not been started. The only way to currently manipulate these files is using a text editor. Not overly difficult, but it would still be a nice touch to have this utility at some point down the road, as an alternative!

There are also currently no download links available for this project unfortunately, as it is still very much a work in progress, and mostly just for personal use. Sorry about that!

In the meantime, feel free to check below for some screenshots of the level designer in action!