skele2d

Skele2D

Skele2D is a game engine based around points, with a fancy in-game editor.

There are lots of 2D game engines based around tiles; this is the opposite of that. It's for games where the world is made of polygons, and the entities are made of points, connected by bones (segments), in arbitrary configurations.

If there's a theme song for Skele2D, it's probably the one that goes:

The hip bone's connected to the back bone
The back bone's connected to the neck bone…

This project is pre-alpha. Consider it unreleased.

Features

• In-game editor
  • Easily drag and drop to place entities in the world
  • Select entities, drag them around, and pose them (with double click)
  • Cut, copy and paste, undo and redo
  • Keyboard shortcuts and context menus
  • Zoom towards the mouse with mousewheel, and pan with middle mouse button
  • Animation editor
    • Shows previews of poses and animations, using the arbitrary drawing code of the entity
    • Create, rename, edit, and delete poses and animations
    • No undo/redo currently, but you can use Git for versioning
• Animations and poses can be blended together and composed any way you want (in code), with tweening/interpolation helpers for both linear and cyclical animations
• Arbitrary data can be associated with points, for use with rendering, physics or whatever, for instance "color", "size", "velocity" - you name it!

Demo

Check out Tiamblia

Setup / API

So far, if you wanted to use this, you'd have to look at the source code, and copy from the examples.

I do maintain a changelog, so you wouldn't be too crazy to try and build a game with this, but nothing's set in stone yet, and you probably want docs.

The library is published on npm as skele2d, and available as UMD and ESM, with minified versions of both.

Right now you have to include Material UI in addition to the module, as seen in the examples. (However, React is bundled with the module, as well as the CSS specific to Skele2D.)

Examples

• examples/webpack-coffee/ - Webpack usage example, with CoffeeScript. This uses Webpack to bundle module imports (including Skele2D and other parts of the example), and coffee-loader to compile CoffeeScript.
• examples/script-tag-coffee/ - Script tag usage example, with CoffeeScript. This uses the in-browser CoffeeScript compiler, and uses globals instead of imports/exports.
• examples/esm/ - ES Modules example. This uses a separate ESM build of Skele2D, and imports it from inside a <script type="module">.
• Tiamblia - A game built with Skele2D (or a fuller example, at least.)

Both of the examples in this repo are super bare-bones, and don't actually show off all the entity types supported by the editor, only terrain — no posable or animated entities. (It was kind of an oversight when I was copying from Tiamblia and trimming it down.)

Dev Setup

Synopsis:

npm install
npm run build
npm run install-example
npm run example

This should run the webpack dev server for the webpack example, with hot module reloading. You can open the example in your browser at http://localhost:8080/ or whatever port it gives you if that's taken.

Webpack in Production

The webpack example can be built for production with:

cd examples/webpack-coffee
npm run build

Then the examples/webpack-coffee directory can be served with any web server, for instance:

python -m http.server

Then open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.

It could be deployed to a static site host, and some files could be excluded like the node_modules directory, source directory, package.json, package-lock.json, and webpack.config.js.

The examples in this repo are not yet deployed, but Tiamblia is deployed to GitHub Pages here, using a dumb Node.js script to copy only the files that are needed, and then the gh-pages package to deploy.

NW.js

The webpack example can also be run in NW.js, with:

npm run example-nw

When running in NW.js it automatically saves the world.json as you edit.

Note: This workflow could be replaced by the FS Access API, which didn't exist when I made this originally. I don't think I'm terribly interested in NW.js for distributing games. It'll still be an option, of course, but it shouldn't be required for a nice workflow.

Running the Script Tag and ESM examples

These examples don't need pre-compiling in principle, but because they live in this repo, for practical purposes they reference the Skele2D build files from the dist directory.

Once the library is built (with npm run build), you can run the examples with any web server, for instance:

npx live-server --open=examples/script-tag-coffee/
npx live-server --open=examples/esm/

This will open the page in your browser, and automatically reload when you make changes to the source code.

Note: it will also reload when editing the library itself, but it won't reflect those changes until you run npm run build again. I could add an --ignore/--ignorePattern flag but I don't think it's worth it for now.

Also note: if you run a server within the directory of the example, it will end up trying to request skele2d.js from outside the server root, which will fail.

(Would it be better to create a symlink, or copy the file to the example directory? That way it would be easer to copy the example as a base for a new project, as it would match more closely how you would include the library. Symlinks might not work for security reasons, though, and copying the file to all the examples seems expensive, especially as I add more examples.)

Troubleshooting

Any time you run into an error like Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'skele2d', just run the following in the examples/webpack-coffee directory:

npm link skele2d

Or alternatively run npm run install-example again.

This can happen when updating dependencies, or (perhaps) when switching branches, or when you've just cloned the repo and haven't run the installation procedure yet.

Roadmap

• Finish separating this out into a reusable library / framework (from Tiamblia)

  • Find a good boundary between the engine and game, and think about how to minimize assumptions
    • When something is part of an application/game, there aren't necessarily any barriers between it and the application/game code, which can make it easy to introduce coupling, which is bad, but importantly, there are no barriers to editing any part of it, which is really nice: you can adapt it to your needs as your needs progress. When you go to separate it out into a library, suddenly you're confronted with either having to remove all the coupling (which takes significant effort and thought), or just sort of "include everything" and make it a grab-bag framework with all the functionality you need for each applications you intend to use it with - which is of course, bad. Or somewhere in between, or whatever.
      • OOP introduces problems with reusability, with its methods on classes/objects. Also if you have any private variables.
    • Try to remove the prescribed Entity class (currently relied upon: x, y, structure, toWorld, fromWorld, and serialization)
    • Ditto for World (currently relied upon for serialization, and directly accessing entities)
    • Look into ResurrectJS for serialization (I'd come across cereal before, but it doesn't handle prototypes); let's see, there's also kaiser, and a few others
      • I did make a system for serializing and deserializing references to other entities, but it only supports references to other entities as top level properties of an entity, because that's all I needed - the player can hold a bow, and an arrow, but for instance if you wanted to have an array of references to other entities (perhaps multiple arrows!), it wouldn't work. I don't think it would actually be that hard to extend it to arbitrarily nested properties, but it would certainly be nice to offload that work and complexity to a library.
    • Separate out world saving/loading logic (you could want to save to and load from a file like I have it now in NW.js, or over the network to a server (Node, Python, PHP, whatever), or to localStorage, IndexedDB, whatever)
  • Get rid of ReactScript (an old library I made, deprecated) in favor of JSX support in CoffeeScript 2 (requires a JSX compilation step!)
  • Documentation!
    • Setup
    • API
    • For now, it is very much a framework, so document how to stay within the bounds of it, and conventions that make it a smoother experience
      • References to other entities must only be at the top level of serialized data for now. References are handled at the top level as a special case, and only for Entity instances.
      • Adding properties to other entities ad-hoc may work, but each entity class is responsible for its own serialization, so it's better to either create get/set methods on target class for a clean API boundary, or the store information about other entities in a map with the keys as entity IDs
      • When animations/poses don't exist, default to @structure.getPose()
        • TODO: implement a way to wait for animation data to be loaded, either as a loading system or just inversion of control
      • Name points and segments like how you'd name variables, so you can access them with destructuring when drawing/stepping (e.g. let {leftArm, rightArm} = @structure.points)
      • A default pose is decided by the (overridable) method initLayout, and if you include "left"/"right" in the names of points it moves them to the left or right, and it uses poses named "Default"/"Stand"/"Standing"/"Idle" in that order (most to least preferred), if one is available.
    • Demos:
      • Improve the simple example, maybe make a logo as part of it
      • Could make a better version of pbp2d, a point based physics sandbox; or a full blown physics engine playground; rigid bodies use polygons and polygons use points too, and generating shapes and bodies from other types of structures would be very much possible too
      • Could do a demo with a totally different renderer, overriding Editor.draw and maybe View, or superimposing canvases so that the editor's own rendering doesn't need to change while using WebGL for game stuff. Three.js could be fun :) for a 2.5D game, or PIXI.js for 2D but still bringing shaders to the table.

• Encourage versioning of world data in examples, such as I do in Tiamblia. Code patterns for upgrading can be pretty simple. Here's another example.

• Add shift/ctrl selection-manipulation modifiers

• Add alt+drag to drag the selection from anywhere (i.e. without having to have your mouse over part of the selection, especially for when the selection is a set of points) (inspired by this video)

• Add undo/redo, frame reordering, and maybe variable delays to the animation editor

• Make undo/redo efficient (currently it saves the entire world state every operation!)

• Use this in a few different games

• It would be nice to have vector maths, haha! Kinda silly how this whole thing is based around points and there's no vector operations

  • We want to keep (the ability to keep) arbitrary data on (or at least associated with) points

Changelog

For a history of changes to the API and the editor, see CHANGELOG.md

License

Open source under the MIT License