One of the game engines I have been working with recently is called Vylocity. Most of you are likely familiar with some of the top game engines and what they offer, such as Unity, Unreal, Godot, Game Maker Studio, etc.
In this blog post I'll introduce the game engine Vylocity, which many of you likely don't know about, and answer these questions:
What is Vylocity?
Why do I use Vylocity?
Why should you use Vylocity?
What are people doing with Vylocity?
1. What Is Vylocity?
According to their website, Vylocity is a free cloud-based game creation service and game portal. It has an all-in-one code editor, map editor, icon editor, and interface editor which is available both online and offline.
It is primarily geared towards developing single and multiplayer 2D games which can be played on Vylocity's website or embedded on any web page.
2. Why do I use Vylocity?
In my career I've worked with a variety of game engines and frameworks including Unity, Construct, Love2D, Cocos2D, which all have 2D tool kits, so the question is why do I sometimes use Vylocity today instead of these, and why might you also?
While Vylocity is a powerful tool for singleplayer games, to me it shines most for multiplayer. I mostly work on singleplayer games; it's a process that I'm comfortable with.
However, I like most people simply feel that multiplayer games are just automatically more fun! In most cases making a multiplayer game is very challenging, and there's a big barrier of skill and knowledge regarding networking.
Vylocity is designed so that any singleplayer game made with it can be made into a multiplayer game that uses an authoritative server.
From there, you can choose to separate parts of the code into client side and server side as you are comfortable with it. In short, I've never had such an easy time getting a multiplayer game working.
3. Why should you use Vylocity?
If you have the itch like I do to make 2D multiplayer games, I really don't know a better solution for you than Vylocity.
With some experience with JavaScript, Python, Lua, etc. you'll be comfortable with Vylocity. There are tutorials to get you started as well as a good set of documentation. Once you work through those, there's also a discord server where people like me can help you out as needed.
4. What are people doing with Vylocity?
Vylocity is a game engine/framework which is currently in Early Access, and as such so are most of the multiplayer games being worked on for it. 😃
Below are screen shots from just some of the games that are being made, including some singleplayer and multiplayer games.
If you've made it this far, you should really check it out and join the Vylocity discord server so you can get involved.
Vylocity Website: https://www.vylocity.com/ Vylocity Discord: https://discord.gg/SyNTRCF