Q: What makes the Citrus Engine different from other Flash game engines?
A: The Citrus Engine was built from the ground up to support large, scalable professionally-made casual games. With the recent maturation of the casual game industry, a high-quality, robust, and professionally supported engine was needed. The Citrus Engine is also the easiest engine to get up and running with a side-scrolling platform game. The developers of the Citrus Engine come from backgrounds at Disney Interactive and Sony Online Entertainment.
Q: Is the Citrus Engine a tile-based engine?
A: Upon initial release, the Citrus Engine will be focused creating physics-based games out-of-the-box. However, CE was built with scalability in mind, so a game of any sort can be made, including tile-based games, blitting-rendered games, or even 3D games.
Q: Is there a level editor for the Citrus Engine?
A: Yes, there are several! The Level Architect has been built specifically for the Citrus Engine, and it is the most well-documented; thus I recommend it the most. You can download it from this site, or grab the source code from the open source code repository.
Q: Is it easy to extend the Citrus Engine to do [insert desired feature]?
A: The Citrus Engine provides a lot of common features right out of the box; however, there will probably be elements of your game that are unique. The Citrus Engine has a solid structure that allows game developers to create their own custom reusable components. If you can imagine it (and you can code it), then you can do it.
Q: You look like you know the Citrus Engine really well. Can you make a game for us?
A: Since I have my own full-time job, I am not currently able to work with other game projects. I do not have enough free-time at the moment, and it would be a conflict of interest with the company I currently work for.
Q: Can I make a game with the Citrus Engine if I don’t know ActionScript?
A: Although there are level editors for the Citrus Engine, someone on your team must have at least intermediate knowledge of ActionScript 3 in order to use it. They should have a solid understanding of object-oriented programming and be able to use ActionScript without ever touching Flash’s timeline. The Citrus Engine was designed to create a separation of workflows among game designers, artists, and programmers.
