Hey, ya'll! It's time to officially announce a huge project! Froggy is a cross-platform game engine I started working on last year using all the knowledge I acquired over the development of Circuit Dude. It will be compatible with #PSVita, #BittBoy, Windows, #RG350, and more!
Even though this is a 2D game engine, Froggy will include a lot of modern features that really makes it stand out. The biggest is the web-based IDE that will create a single executable file for each system (like 7 at the moment). No need to install any compiler on your end!
How does Froggy do this? There's a series of more complex steps, but basically, the executables come pre-compiled without any of the Froggy packages attached. The web editor was used to generate some of the engine's code, to keep both the IDE and engine in sync...
This allows the web-based IDE (probably an Electron app) to know exactly how to insert the Froggy bundle into the binary. To prevent a lot of file reads and unnecessary RAM usage, the bundles are typically stored inside of the executable's overlay. Here's a rough outline.
To write scripts for the game's objects, you'll be able to use a proprietary scripting language that's pretty simple to use and can be written a little like Excel's scripting language. There's also an option to write it like more traditional code....
For a previous project, I used this method and also implemented a graphical view. This screenshot's a little outdated, but it should give an idea of how a visual version of the language will come out. Either way you write the code, it's transpiled to bytecode.
In Froggy, there're gameobjects (called instances) like you'd find in Unity/GameMaker, but I take it up a notch... The scene, itself, is an instance, and so is the entire game, itself. This means that when you change scenes, you can keep persistent data in the game's instance.
I'm really looking forward to showing off other features, but what kinds of games can you create with Froggy? It has been designed to make GBC/GBA-style top-down RPG's, but I also wanted it to be versatile enough to be able to recreate Circuit Dude with it. 😅
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