FlatRedBall is an actively developed, open-source game engine, tooling, and community focused on making the creation of 2.5d games extremely fast and flexible. FlatRedBall is optimized for 2d, pixel art graphics and has out-of-the-box features that solve common problems in 2d genres such as platforming and top-down movement.
FlatRedBall makes heavy use of code generation, which is easy to step through and debug. Combined with its open-source, there are no “black boxes” – developers have ultimate control and visibility into what’s happening in both game and engine code.
Who Is FlatRedBall For?
FlatRedBall excels at retro-style 2d games such as platformers, top down perspective, side and top scrolling games, and similar genres. FlatRedBall is for developers that want to make this style of game with a powerful set of tools to speed up development and content creation. It is also for developers that like to have visibility and control over what their game code is doing, and value the ability to debug and profile every aspect of their game code.
FlatRedBall is a relatively small community where users often have direct access to the main engine contributors. It has no licensing fees and is open source. FlatRedBall supports cross-platform releases on PC, Mac, mobile, and Xbox. Linux, PlayStation and Switch support are possible but need collaboration between the FlatRedBall team and the game developer!
Who is FlatRedBall NOT For?
FlatRedBall focuses on 2d and 2.5d games that primarily use sprites. The engine is capable of loading and rendering 3d models, advanced lighting and shaders. But this is not the focus for the contributor team behind the engine. If you are making a 3d first person shooter with the latest in lighting and shader effects, FlatRedBall is likely not a good fit for your project!
What is the Difference Between FlatRedBall and Monogame?
MonoGame is a game framework that provides support for common low-level game development tasks. However, it doesn’t offer robust collision, a UI solution, conventions for animating sprites, rendering tilemaps, managing the scene graph, and many more features.
For a complete list of FlatRedBall features, see the FlatRedBall Features (TODO: link once page exists!)
What are the FlatRedBall Features?
Check out our page on FlatRedBall Features (TODO: link once page exists!)
What games have been made with FlatRedBall?
The FlatRedBall Github readme includes a List of FlatRedBall games.