Polaris Engine is the first-class development software for visual novel creation.
Polaris Engine has an open-source philosophy and is designed with a true cross-platform portablity including iOS, Android, even gaming consoles. It is equipped with features and tools of production-grade quality. Polaris Engine is perfect for both beginners and seasoned creators alike.
Effortlessness and efficiently are key concepts of Polaris Engine. It provides that without sacrificing features or usability to enrich both the creator and user experience.
Polaris Engine don't aim for no-code but it achieve low-code using multiple Domain Specific Languages). Specifically, there are separate languages for scenarios, user interfaces, and logics. We are in the process of adding a little graphical support for each DSL. This is quite different from other engines and we call it "Visual Live Scripting" technology. The author thinks as a researcher of software engineering that VLS is one shape of RAD, Rapid Application Development.
"The New Standard for Visual Novel Creation", in the era of 2020s and beyond, is the current goal of the Polaris Engine development.
- Mission
- Simple: Polaris Engine enables the creation of Visual Novels in an easy and efficient manner.
- Fast: Apps are constructed using native technologies only, ensuring resource efficiency on mobile devices.
- Free: We are an open source project and we make our technology public as pro-bono-publico with respects for intellectual properties of others.
- Vision
- Earning: Game developers can publish their games on stores and earn income.
- Prosperity: Our aim is to create a world where anyone can make a living with just a single computer including mobile devices.
- Talent: Bringing people with talents but difficulties into the world (Giftedness support)
- Values
- Information: We hold the belief that the creation and generation of information including story writing is humanity's true value.
- Market: We shall complete the market launch of game subscriptions with world leading platform partners.
- Diversity: Develop, distribute, and publish on all platforms - Polaris Engine seeks the true portability and we call it diversity.
Please visit the official Web site to obtain the latest release.
See also Build Instructions for more details.
On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install -y git build-essential libasound2-dev libx11-dev mesa-common-dev qt6-base-dev qt6-multimedia-dev libwebp-dev
git clone https://github.com/ktabata/polaris-engine.git
./configure
make
sudo make install
polaris-engine
Feel free to ask anything in this server. Any language will do.
This software is released under the MIT license.
There is no restriction on distribution and or modification of the Polaris Engine Source Code. This project will never be commercialized in the future. Please use Polaris Engine with confidence.
The best way to contribute to this project is to use it and give us feedback. We are always open to suggestions and ideas.
Games made with Polaris Engine can run on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, Android, Web browser, Chromebook, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and commercial gaming consoles.
Polaris Engine consists of the platform independent core (CORE) and the hardware abstraction layer (HAL). The CORE is written in ANSI C, the most portable programming language in the world, while HAL implementations are currently written in C, C++, Objective-C, Swift and Java.
If you would like to port Polaris Engine to a new target platform, you only need to write a thin HAL, this is generally possible within a week.
Polaris Engine does not depend on SDKs or frameworks such as Unity, Godot, Python, or SDL2, this is thanks to the extensive design of HAL, our compatibility layer's API.
- We currently don't have a way to do CI/CD on the cloud due to lacks of code signing capabilities.
- However, the author has a release script and thus releases are fully automated on his MacBook Pro.
- The release script builds all binaries and uploads them to the Web site and GitHub.
- It also posts a message to the Discord server.
- This is generally done in 10 minutes via FTTH, or 20 minutes via LTE/5G.
Polaris Engine is the successor of Suika2 and Suika Studio (Suika1).