Overview / Usage

Inspired from Mario Maker, MakerKing is the first to mix level creation with a complete multiplayer environment. It's also free and on PC making it much more accessible than its console counterpart.

MakerKing is a platformer about level creation and sharing. With the fully integrated level editor, anyone can create levels in a couple of minutes and upload it onto our servers. All uploaded levels are playable online with others in real time. Players can also race one another in any level or climb leaderboards to earn scores and compete in the global rankings.

The project aims to expand this concept of maker games first introduced by Mario Maker. We introduced this new and unique feature the mob maker which let's players create their own living creatures in-game. This editor within an editor is the first of it's kind and we truly believe it expanded what the maker-genre is.

Methodology / Approach

Our development process is pretty simple but quite structured. We set up a plan of what we would want to achieve and execute it the best we can. Some features involved a lot of research however, such as our 2D dynamic lighting. We needed a system that treats every empty block as a source of sun light when the map can be anything. Trial and error was our only help in this case. We had a problems of having to make tons of normal maps too. We ended up having to make a new tool called NormalPainter to be able to make all the normal maps in time.

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Our philosophy when working on MakerKing is to give maximum freedom to players. I wanted to make a game where players make their own levels. Then later in development I wanted to add living creatures to the game but I didn't like the idea of those creatures being limited to what I would make them. Therefore I just made the creature editor instead to put the tools in the hand of the players. We intend to continue on this direction with an integratred music composer and even a script editor so players can learn programming (in a scratch-like simplified interface) and give commands to robot creatures.

Technologies Used

• Java
• LWJGL (OpenGL wrapper)
• libGDX
• NormalPainter
• OpenAL
• Packr

Other links

• Steam page
• Website
• Itch.io page