Documentation

Integration

The Qiso isometric tilemap engine is available as a plugin for Solar2D, so integration is as easy as any other plugin. It's written in pure Lua so is platform independent, and is designed to make creating isometric games effortless.

First, get the Qiso plugin from the Solar2D Plugins Marketplace and update your projects build.settings file as per the marketplace instructions.

Then just load the Qiso library from within your game code. and use the setAssetsFolder() function to tell the library where your map assets (tile sprites, etc) are:


	local qiso = require "plugin.qisoengine"
	qiso.setAssetsFolder("assets")

That's it! Follow the quick start sample below and explore the complete function reference to see what you can do with our engine. You'll be making isometric games in minutes!

Quick Start

Once you've followed the integration guide above, you're ready to start making isometric games. Using Qiso is easy but you should be aware that producing isometric graphics can be time consuming. In reality, you're likely to grasp Qiso in minutes but then spend weeks producing your assets. For this reason, we'd recommend grabbing some free isometric sprites to play with initially. Here's a very small sample set of our own that you're welcome to use while learning.

Qiso supports loading in raw tilemap data via the setMapData() function and this is the recommended method for efficiency, but the quickest and easiest method is to create a map using the brilliant Tiled Map Editor, export as Lua code, and load it up with the loadTiledMap() function. Here's a very simple example tilemap exported from Tiled which you can add to your own assets folder and import.


	-- Load plugin library
	local qiso = require "plugin.qisoengine"

	-- Load a Lua formatted Tiled Map Editor tilemap into a Qiso map.
	qiso.loadTiledMap("sample-tilemap")

	-- Enable zooming when the screen is pinched
	qiso.enablePinchZoom()

	-- Enable camera panning when the screen is dragged
	qiso.enableCameraPan()

	-- Enable the main Qiso loop to render/update our world
	qiso.activate()

This should give you a working tilemap that you can drag around and pinch. Explore Qiso's other functions to start interacting with your map and adding characters. Before you know it, you'll have a playable game!

Function Reference