September 2016

Archive for September 2016

FGMK is my first attempt at a game maker

Since the post A tilemap in PyQt for a bigger game Project I have been working in something that at the time I wasn't quite sure of what it was. And now I think I am going somewhere. I present you my game maker, named FGMK.


At the time of this writing, I am at version 0.5.3, I have a huge backlog of things I want to implement: scripting, plugins, monster design, hero design, skill design, scripted battles, ...

So what's this? Well, a long time ago, I participated in the 2012 edition of the Global Game Jam. At the time, the game we made (with Unity) could be played in the browser, but required plugins. So the person that wanted to play your game had to install the Unity plugin. The Unity plugin was available only to Windows, so not only you had to convince the user to install it, he had to use the specific system to play the game. 

At the same Global Game Jam, a guy made a game with HTML and Javascript. The game was great, and you only needed a browser to play the game. And no plugins. I was impressed. Small code, that worked well anywhere. And the code at the time was just there, no license. I talked to the single developer of the game, asked if I could take the code, look at it, and build something VERY similar. This guy is Lino and the game he made was Redo. He said "sure, code is fine, the assets I have to ask to not to use because I am using in a game I am publishing".

So at first I made a simple python visualizer for the maps in Redo (this was around August 2014). And then I decided, ok, time to make an engine I can freely script. The engine evolved, I decided to try to build a map editor... And after lots of commits, and lots of refactoring to have something that you could run in most operating systems (Win, OSX, Linux)... Now I have something I feel it's ok to be kind of proud.

So FGMK was to be an acronym of Fan Game MaKer. It's also easy to type in the shell, because I typed this string a lot.

The Github page is github.com/ericoporto/fgmk . If you have Python3 (and pip), you can install using:

pip3 install fgmk

And that's it. When I reach a nice 1.0.0 I will release real packages for the three main operating systems.

If you are only curious about the engine, the code is in github.com/ericoporto/fgmkJsEngine and there is a demo here. The demo should run in anything that has a keyboard or a touchscreen. And you only need a browser.

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