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.