What is IceCream?

Introduction

IceCream is a powerful and feature rich open-source 2D engine for XNA games.

Designed speciffically to take advantage of the 2D hardware accelerated capabilities of the XNA framework, IceCream is the perfect solution to quickly and easily create 2D games on Windows and XBOX360.

IceCream comes with its own authoring tool: Milkshake. This editor allows you to easilly design all the elements of your game, from the texture selection to game object’s components edition.

IceCream is developed by Conkerjo (SBARG) and Epsicode (Little Gamers)

IceCream – Features

Rendering

• Custom flexible rendering engine based on XNA SpriteBatches
• 10 Rendering layers
• Each layer possess 6 sub-layers, one per blending type:
  • Subtractive Background
  • Additive Background
  • Alpha
  • Additive
  • Subtractive
  • Refractive (uses a custom pixel shader to use refraction based on the texture’s color)
• 2D Camera with full support of zoom and rotation
• Split screen support
• Embedded pixel shaders: Bloom, Gaussian Blur, and many more to come
• Support for custom pixel shaders

Scene Items Types

• Sprite
• Animation
• Tile Grids
• Particle Effect (very advanced, for beautiful and elaborate effects)
• Post Processing Animation, to easily animate pixel shaders
• Text

Architecture

• Component based architecture
• Scene Graph hierarchy
• Pooling (to avoid production of garbage)
• Object Template support (project scope or local scene scope)

Embedded Components

• 2D swept polygon collision detection and reaction (convex polygons only)

Milkshake – Features

• Complete Scene Graph support, treeview of objects sorted by types, and embedded XNA GraphicsDevice for direct visual edition of your scenes
• Visual editor for every SceneItem types:
  • Sprite Editor;
  • Animation Editor;
  • Tile Grid Editor;
  • Particle Effects Editor;
  • Post Processing Animation Editor;
  • Polygon Editor;
• Auto generation of GUI fields of your IceCream Components public properties; allowing very easy edition of your game objects, without the need of creating your own editor
• Plugin Support to program your own SceneItem Editors; for your complex game specifics need