Demos & Contributing

Demos

Two finished projects ship in the repository’s demos/ folder. They’re the best way to see the engine, the editor, and the scripting API working together — and great things to pick apart when you wonder “how would I do X?”.

Platformer

A small side-scroller with lit sprites, tilemap levels, animated coins, and a Lua-scripted player. Open it in the editor or play it directly:

./editor demos/platformer/main.k2project
./player demos/platformer/main.k2project

Controls — move with A/D or the arrow keys, jump with Space, W, or Up, and walk into coins to collect them (watch the Log Viewer count them).

Things to try

Each of these takes a minute and teaches you a corner of the editor:

• Select the player in the Entity Selector and look at the Inspector — a real character is just a Sprite, a Collider, and a Script.
• Open scripts/player.lua in a text editor. In ~100 lines it covers input, gravity, jumping, collision, and coin pickup — all with the functions from the Scripting page. Change JUMP_SPEED at the top, press play, and feel the difference.
• Paint the level: select a tilemap entity, open the Tilemap Editor, and add a platform. Press play and stand on it.
• Change the mood: find the Environment component (on the camera) and lower ambient_intensity — the scene falls into darkness, and the lights suddenly matter.
• Break something on purpose: add a typo to player.lua and press play. See how the error appears in the Log Viewer? That’s your debugging loop.

Remember: play mode runs on a copy of the scene, so experiment freely — stopping undoes everything that happened while playing.

Crystal Keep

A complete five-level tower-defense campaign, built entirely as kione content. There is no engine-side game code. Every map is an autotiled TileMap, every unit and effect comes from one spritesheet, the HUD and health bars are drawn primitives, all audio is procedurally generated, and the waves, economy, and campaign flow are ~15 small Lua scripts:

./editor demos/towerdefense/res/game.k2project
./player demos/towerdefense/res/game.k2project

Controls: hover or A/D picks a build pad, 1/2/3 builds a gun, cannon, or missile tower, R retries a level. Gun turrets hit air, cannons splash ground, missiles home. Progress saves between runs.

It shows the engine’s systems at full stretch: night scenes lit by campfires, headlights, and muzzle flashes; six enemy types including composite tanks (a turret entity riding a hull) and bombers with drawn ground shadows.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! We happily take:

• Bug reports — the more reproducible, the better.
• Small, meaningful feature requests and implementations.

Kione is intentionally a small hobby engine — it is not trying to compete with Godot or Unity. Please keep proposals in that spirit: focused, self-contained improvements that keep the engine approachable and easy to read.