This is our game dev story.

Steffen is already an advanced computer scientist with work experience, while Matthias has just started studying Computational Linguistics at university.

To gain confidence programming in Java, Matthias follows a tutorial creating a flappy bird clone in Java with LibGDX.

He ends up with a first version of Happy Goat and learns a lot about Java programming on the way.

To really teach ourselves the basics of video game development, we start writing a 2D stoneage MOBA game from scratch in pure Java instead of using pre-existing libraries / engines.

Based on the ancient greek word for ‘stone‘ – ‘lithos‘, we name the heroes of the game ‘liti‘, a neologism meaning something like ‘the stonies‘ (Don’t judge!). The title of our epic prehistoric masterpiece would go down in the annals of history as LITI – Stoneage Brawl.

In the following two years, we learn a lot about 2D physics, tilemaps, rendering processes, networking, particle systems, drawing, animating, game design, etc., while recognizing the huge potential of the technology we’ve created.

Steadily, we begin extracting the core mechanics of the game into a separate library in order to reuse them for future projects.

LITIengine has become a separate project.
In order to stress-test the engine, we decide to participate in our very first game jam, the famous Ludum Dare jam. Within 72 hours, we create a humourous zombie shooter going by the name
DR. LEPUS – The last rabbit on earth.
We enjoy the game a lot and decide to develop it into a full commercial game later on. At this point, we decide to postpone LITI’s production to recharge creatively and try some new things with our beloved engine.

During the Ludum Dare 38 game jam, we create the reaction-based puzzle game Naughty Gnomes, where you try to throw cakes at pesky circus gnomes to reclaim your stolen clown nose.

After the exhausting game jam, we publish LITIENGINE v0.4-alpha as an open source project on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.
Going open source, we channel the power of the crowd to create
the ultimate 2D Java Game engine.

At this point, we introduce the iconic LITIENGINE logo. It is designed to trigger nostalgia for pixel art games, while emphasizing LITIENGINE’s world building aspect with its labyrinth-like structure.

At some point it dawns upon us that we should probably gain experience concerning the digital distribution of commercial indie games
if we want the launch of DR. LEPUS to be successful.

Therefore, we come up with a small project to become familiar with steamworks and indie game publishing in general:

Naughty Elves, an enhanced take on the core gameplay of
‘Naughty Gnomes’ with a christmas setting, is released via Steam in the pre-christmas season 2017.

The feedback and experience gained from Naughty Elves is very valuable for our future efforts.
DR. LEPUS, on the other hand, is shaping up nicely: Revamped graphics, more weapons and upgrades, and tons of other cool features have transformed the game into an entirely new one.

Ludum Dare 42. Oh boy. ‘GoIn – Behave or GET LOST! is originally meant to be a night club managing simulation where you need to keep your customers happy. The final version of the game is… a little different. The Goal: Throw naked people out of a night club to keep paying customers happy!

LITIENGINE becomes known to more and more people, even third-party collaborators join in on the development.
We steadily register 1.2k monthly visitors on litiengine.com, proving that the open source approach has made LITIENGINE flourish.

To meet the increasing interest in LITIENGINE and enable public discussions, we launch the official LITIENGINE Forum.
At the same time, we set up the long overdue LITIENGINE documentation pages.

To celebrate the new decade appropriately, we decide to redesign the LITIENGINE logo after delivering the huge “New Decade” release v0.4.18 on New Year’s day.

The new logo features a more streamlined and elegantly simple look that conveys the professional quality standard we have set for LITIENGINE.

For Ludum Dare 46, we create the action-based farming simulator Pumpkin Keeper.

Water your pumpkins and prevent enemy farmers from ruining your harvest!