Showcase » Lands of Cinder

This is an isometric role-playing game for desktops and Android based on libGDX. It was created as a student project over one year 2015 to 2016 at Nuremberg Institute of Technology by fellow students and me. Although we tried to keep the code pretty clean, this was in our early programming days, and with deadlines and quick fixes there is definitely a lot of cruft. There are a lot of bugs and specific actions that lead to game crashes.

Our main motivation was to learn and get insights into many of the aspects of game development, which led to the decision of using a smaller framework like libGDX instead of a more advanced game engine. This way, we had a lot to implement which is usually provided by the engine, but nothing too deep.

Game Features

  • Grid based movement with A* pathfinding and steering
  • Basic turn based combat system with skills and enemy “AI”
  • Quest and dialog system
  • Item, inventory and stat system
  • Access to online content created by other users
  • Isometric 3D graphics on 2D backgrounds and particles
  • Triggered sounds and music
  • XML based description for everything
Image showing a dialogue between the main character and uncle Rufus
Dialogue with uncle Rufus for the introductory quest.
Image showing the basement of the forest hut
The basement of the forest hut, the first quest item can be found here.

Editor Features

  • Level editor with a selection of entities and backgrounds
  • Each entity can be modified and given dialogue
  • Quest + dialogue editor
  • Uploading and hosting levels on the server
  • Support for height maps for more complicated backgrounds
Image showing the editor view of the bar scene
Editor view of the bar scene.
Image showing a list of available entities in the editor
Lists of available entities in the editor.

Online component

A big part is allowing users to create content for the game with the inbuilt editor and sharing tools. The online component, which consists of a node based server, is hosted here. However, it is pretty buggy, and I commented out those parts in the main repository.

Additional content

A lot of work, and definitely fun, went into all the aspects of the game:

  • Programming, of course
  • Ingame sounds, which were created in a studio during an Audio project
  • Models and prerendered backgrounds, with Blender
  • Animations, with Blender (some of them might by free Animations by Mixamo, I don’t remember if we replaced them)
  • Songs were composed and produced by Willi
  • Concept drawings & story
  • Animated spotlights for marketing
  • Posters for each of the end of semester presentations

In the stuff/ directory a lot of the source material for the mentioned media is available.