Julian Murgia

Escoria is a Libre framework for the creation of point-and-click adventure games with MIT-Licenced Godot Engine. Since its release, Godot Engine changed a lot at fast pace while Escoria code was still based on old Godot 1.x features.

In this presentation, I'll present the current state of Escoria and discuss the process of rewrite as a Godot Engine plugin. It'll cover architecture and design, allowing adventure game creators to use Godot Engine as a full-featured editor for their adventure game.

Escoria is a Libre framework for the creation of point-and-click adventure games with MIT-Licenced Godot Engine. It was initially developed for the adventure game The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy® and later streamlined for broader usages and open sourced as promised to the backers of the Dog Mendonça Kickstarter campaign. Since its release, Godot Engine changed a lot at fast pace while Escoria code was still based on old Godot 1.x features. It is more a collection of dedicated scripts than a proper Godot Engine layer designed for point and click adventure games. Evolving Escoria is quite a big task, so it might be better to actually start it over with a new project architecture while keeping its most interesting features in the process.

In this presentation, I'll present the current state of Escoria and discuss the process of rewrite as a Godot Engine plugin. It'll cover architecture and design, allowing them to use Godot Engine as a full-featured editor for their adventure game.

Welcome to FOSDEM game development devroom! We'll present what this is all about and invite you to participate.

The Godot community has released a full-featured point'n'click adventure game framework based on Godot Engine. It is fully open source (MIT licensed) and comes with a great open source manual and demo game written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community. This presentation aims at showcasing Escoria, its features and the basics of using it, to give attendants a good starting point for creating their own point'n'click games.

Back when they kickstarted their Godot Engine-powered point'n'click adventure game The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, its developers had promised that they would release the framework they developed under a free and open source license. This finally happened in October 2016, after some important refactoring to make it suitable for any kind of point'n'click game. At the same time, a great open source manual and demo game (see links) were released, written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community.

The free and open source world has therefore an advanced point'n'click framework at the ready with both source code, demos and documentation, only waiting for game designers and artists to create awesome adventure games (both open source and proprietary, the engine license is not restrictive). To give an idea of the tool's maturity, Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Double Fine Productions said of it, when visiting the developers of The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, that "it looks just like SCUMM!" (the engine used by LucasArts for their classic adventure games). Escoria is based on the 2D and 3D Godot game engine, and can thus leverage many features that are not common in point'n'click adventure games, which allows for the creation of interesting hybrid genres.

In this presentation, we will showcase the features of Escoria, how to setup a new project with it and use its scripting language to create classic point'n'click scenes. Basic knowledge of Godot's interface is not mandatory, as we will try to explain also what features are specific to Escoria and which ones are specific to Godot. The presentation will reuse elements of the existing manual and demo in attempt to be as clear as possible, and to allow attendants to continue their discovery of Escoria using resources they are already familiar with.