Brussels / 4 & 5 February 2017

schedule

Escoria, a libre point'n'click framework using Godot Engine

"Oh, it looks just like SCUMM!" -- Tim Schafer


The Godot community has released a full-featured point'n'click adventure game framework based on Godot Engine. It is fully open source (MIT licensed) and comes with a great open source manual and demo game written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community. This presentation aims at showcasing Escoria, its features and the basics of using it, to give attendants a good starting point for creating their own point'n'click games.

Back when they kickstarted their Godot Engine-powered point'n'click adventure game The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, its developers had promised that they would release the framework they developed under a free and open source license. This finally happened in October 2016, after some important refactoring to make it suitable for any kind of point'n'click game. At the same time, a great open source manual and demo game (see links) were released, written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community.

The free and open source world has therefore an advanced point'n'click framework at the ready with both source code, demos and documentation, only waiting for game designers and artists to create awesome adventure games (both open source and proprietary, the engine license is not restrictive). To give an idea of the tool's maturity, Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Double Fine Productions said of it, when visiting the developers of The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, that "it looks just like SCUMM!" (the engine used by LucasArts for their classic adventure games). Escoria is based on the 2D and 3D Godot game engine, and can thus leverage many features that are not common in point'n'click adventure games, which allows for the creation of interesting hybrid genres.

In this presentation, we will showcase the features of Escoria, how to setup a new project with it and use its scripting language to create classic point'n'click scenes. Basic knowledge of Godot's interface is not mandatory, as we will try to explain also what features are specific to Escoria and which ones are specific to Godot. The presentation will reuse elements of the existing manual and demo in attempt to be as clear as possible, and to allow attendants to continue their discovery of Escoria using resources they are already familiar with.

Speakers

Photo of Rémi Verschelde Rémi Verschelde
Photo of Julian Murgia Julian Murgia

Links