FES Retro Game Framework is now available on the Unity Asset Store for your kind consideration!
FES was born when I set out to start a retro pixel game project. I was looking around for an engine to try next. I tried a number of things, from GameMaker, to Fantasy Consoles, to MonoGame and Godot and then ended up back at Unity. Unity is just unbeatable in it's cross-platform support, and ease of deployment, but it sure as heck gets in the way of proper retro pixel games!
So I poured over the Unity pipeline and found the lowest levels I could tie into and bring up a new retro game engine inside of Unity, but with a completely different source-code-only, classic game-loop retro blitting and bleeping API. Months of polishing and tweaking later I ended up with FES.
Some FES features:
- Pixel perfect rendering
- RGB and Indexed color mode, with palette swapping support
- Primitive shape rendering, lines, rectangles, ellipses, pixels
- Multi-layered tilemaps with TMX file support
- Offscreen rendering
- Text rendering, with text alignment, overflow settings, and custom pixel font support
- Clipping
- Custom Shaders
- Sound and Music APIs
- Simplified Input handling
- Wide pixel support (think Atari 2600)
- Post processing and transition effects, such as scanlines, screen wipes, screen shake, fade, pixelate and more
- Deploy to all Unity supported platforms
I've put in lots of hours into a very detail documentation, you can flip through it here to get an better glimpse at the features and general overview: http://www.pixeltrollgames.com/fes/docs/index.html
FES is carefully designed and well optimized (see live stress test demo below). Internally it uses batching, it chunks tilemaps, is careful about memory allocations, and tries to be smart about any heavy operations.
Please have a quick look at the screenshots and live demos below and let me know what you think! I'd love to hear some opinions, feedback and questions!
I hope I've tickled your retro feels!
More images at: https://imgur.com/a/LFMAc
Live demo feature reel: https://pixeltrollgames.itch.io/fes
Live blitting stress test: https://pixeltrollgames.itch.io/fes-stress
Unity Asset Store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/102064
