Diablo2D

Why it's ranked here

The project already connects many hard gameplay systems instead of presenting isolated demos. Combat events feed damage feedback, deaths, loot, and experience, while equipment affects calculated stats. Its own documentation still calls the world basic and several larger features remain targets, so treat it as active groundwork rather than a finished game.

What's good

The event-driven combat design keeps attacks, damage displays, deaths, and loot loosely connected. A reusable entity-component system supports efficient component queries across scenes. Input covers keyboard layouts and mouse movement, while targeting, cooldowns, enemy separation, knockback, potions, skills, and modal scenes form a coherent playable loop.

Tradeoffs

The inventory overlay is explicitly described as a stub, and the documented world is a basic sandbox. Procedural overworld runs, towns, vendors, shops, and deeper dungeon work appear as targets or open tasks. The initial automated tests focus on aggro helpers, so the stated test coverage is narrower than the gameplay surface.

How to use it well

Use it as a Lua and LÖVE reference project for studying entity-component gameplay architecture, event-based combat, randomized items, and layered game scenes. It suits developers prototyping or extending an action roguelike. It does not yet cover the needs of someone seeking a complete, content-rich commercial game or general-purpose engine.

Observed

Primary language

Lua, using the LÖVE framework and a LuaJIT editor runtime configuration.

Install surface

Install LÖVE 11.x or later, clone the repository, then run the project root.

Bundled launch option

The repository includes Diablo.love, which can be opened directly with LÖVE.

Interface

Graphical desktop game controlled through keyboard and mouse input.

Quality tooling

The documented workflow uses luacheck for linting and Busted for unit tests.

Architecture

A homegrown entity-component system organizes pure-data entities and component-querying systems.