ffilmation

The third game engine on my list, ffilmation has a lot going for it. By substituting the assets in the demo levels I am able to create a sketchy walkabout iso game proof-of-concept in about an afternoon. It also comes with a free level editor, and is tied pretty closely to the Flash IDE (it can be set up with Flex as well, but you will still need Flash to create assets).

What worries me is that it looks like a one-man labor of love project. There has been little/no activity on the site in quite a while. There doesn’t appear to be much of a community built up around it. I thought it must be because the source is not hosted under version control and there is no licensing information. But I was wrong- it is now hosted on Google Code – but still only the one contributor. And it has an MIT license.

Still, ffilmation has a lot of potential, and has the most complete feature set of any engine I have looked at so far for my goals.

That includes:

• texturing with bumpmaps
• animated, scriptable lighting
• simple 3d prisms
• projectiles
• heads-up display
• ISO character sprites
• Multiple characters
• Collision detection

Hoping to have something worthwhile to show clients from this soon.

Here’s a shot of a space adapted from one of the examples provided on the site. The character was created in Poser.