Engine

When starting the development of our adventure game "2080: Operation Sunshield", we had the challenge to choose a game engine. Considering the existing solutions for adventure game development, we asked ourselves whether we could come up with our own solution - a solution that could be open-source, cross-platform, and integrated with the Spine animation system.

The ALPACA Engine

Our solution is "ALPACA" - A Library for Point And Click Adventures. It combines existing solutions like Spine animations, Lua scripting and Rhubarb Lip Sync, as well as an own dialog system (see below).

It has some nice and handy features like hot reloading for assets, video and gif recording. The engine is available as open source software under the permissive zlib license and has some documentation on the ALPACA Engine Website.

The Schnack Dialog System

The dialog system for the engine is a custom solution. Dialogs (and monologs) are written in a node-based editor. The dialogs are then interpreted by the dialog runtime that is used in the game.

The dialog editor and runtimes "Schnack" are available as open source software and can also used without ALPACA for other games. Schnack not only features node-based editing and Lua integration, but also offers a builtin solution for localization and PDF export for recording voice acting.

"Schnack" (pronounced "shnuck") is the word for "chitchat" or "talking" in the north German dialect.