The story of dahlia (at least in the public eye) begins here, with the first devlog. No release has been published as of yet, because we're still quite far from having all the basic features in, so hang tight and I'll be making updates as we go.

The backstory

I think Solar2D is a great 2D engine for many reasons. It's light-weight, fast and very extensible, among so many other reasons. The one thing solar2D doesn't have though, is an editor, making it more of an SDK than a complete game engine (it was called Corona SDK after all). As you'd assume, this makes level design quite difficult, especially if you're used to a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) workflow.

The simulator that solar2D comes with does a great job of helping you see what you're doing, but you still have to tweak the numbers and code manually. As you'd imagine, this can be a nightmare for UI and level design. Tweak object coordinates, check simulator, move x up one pixel, check simulator, on and on, until it looks good. Dreadful.

The Tiled map editor has really helped alleviate this struggle, but it's not a perfect solution. You still have to integrate one of the available runtimes such as ponytiled or million tile engine into your game and cross-check with the simulator. Also, tiled doesn't support all the objects solar2D does, so work-arounds and compromises will have to be made. This is in no way me saying tiled is not a good editor. In fact it's perfect for tilemaps, and dahlia will eventually support tilemaps and scenes created in Tiled.

I've always loved point and click games, like those made by Glitch games (using solar2D, can you believe it?). As such, I've long dreamt of creating my own someday. If I'm going to do so without wasting lots of time on small tweaks and losing my mind in the process, I'll need a good editor that works natively with solar2D.

Dahlia Studio was originally intended to be a small, highly specialized level editor, but the first versions were very limited and quite subpar because of this (and my mediocre coding skills). I ended up abandoning the idea for a while, for various reasons.

In the present, I have released 3 open-source plugins (here) for solar2D with over 400 combined downloads and one of them is used in an exciting upcoming game (Puzzles for Clef). I'm quite proud of this as you'd imagine, and now that I have a better understanding of how the engine and game dev in general works, I'm rebuilding dahlia from scratch and it's coming along very nicely.

Dahlia Studio

Dahlia will be a general purpose editor for Solar2D, allowing you to make anything you can with solar2D, but with the perks of having an editor where you can quickly and easily create and populate scenes and avoid various boilerplate. I've also got a lot of cool stuff planned for the future, such as an animation editor à la spine, but don't hold your breath for that, it's still very far down the roadmap.

This is all quite a bit of work for one guy (me), so Dahlia Studio will not be free or open source upon release. Don't fret however, it'll be a one-time fee in exchange for heaps of new features and convenience.

Until next time.