kione

Editor included

A docking editor with scene/entity/component editing, live play mode, and tileset, tilemap, and animation authoring. Everything you need to build a game without leaving the app.

Lua scripting

Drive entities with per-entity Lua: read input, move and animate, spawn and query, and store custom data other entities can read. Here’s the heart of the demo’s player controller:

function on_update(entity, dt)
  local transform = entity:transform()

  local move = 0.0
  if Input.is_key_down(Key.a) or Input.is_key_down(Key.left) then move = move - 1.0 end
  if Input.is_key_down(Key.d) or Input.is_key_down(Key.right) then move = move + 1.0 end
  vx = move * MOVE_SPEED

  local jump = Input.is_key_down(Key.space) or Input.is_key_down(Key.up)
  if jump and not jump_held and grounded then
    vy = JUMP_SPEED
    grounded = false
  end
  jump_held = jump

  vy = math.max(vy - GRAVITY * dt, -MAX_FALL)
  transform.translation.x = transform.translation.x + vx * dt
  transform.translation.y = transform.translation.y + vy * dt
end

Lit 2D rendering

Batched sprites with deferred ambient/point/spot/sprite lights, HDR tone mapping, bloom, SDF text, and tilemaps, so a pixel-art scene lights up without hand-painting shadows.

Readable projects

Scenes and projects serialize to plain YAML, which is easy to diff, hand-edit, and generate (even by an LLM). A whole entity is just a few lines:

- Entity: 0
  TagComponent: Player
  TransformComponent:
    Translation: [0, 0, 0]
  SpriteComponent:
    Texture: hero
    Size: [16, 32]
  ScriptComponent:
    Script: player

A complete game in the box

The repository hosts Crystal Keep, a five-level night-time tower defense built entirely as kione content: autotiled maps, enemy waves and economy in Lua, dynamic lighting, a HUD, and audio. No engine-side game code. Play it, then pick it apart.

A small 2D engine you can own

Kione is a tiny, hobby-scale 2D game engine with a full editor, a Lua scripting layer, and human-readable project files. Build your game in the editor, script it in Lua, and ship it by dropping your project next to the runtime. No build step required. Two finished projects live in demos/: a platformer and the Crystal Keep tower-defense game.

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