Clone and run for a perfect Electron game project starting place
The Pixitron Game Engine by Lost Astronaut Studios (lostastronaut.com). It's not a game, just a starting place. As seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzilNkL7KAZGoeKIsDpo0CPQv7UCL_Gms
This is a minimal boilerplate / starting place for making an Electron-structured PixiJS application based on the Electron Quick Start, combined with some custom Pixijs code and voila!,
Comes with a gamepad console up for testing any game controllers you might have connected, and a keyboard mapping area already configured to easily bind to various special key events. Audio is played through HTML5, but ships with Howler.js if you want something more substantial for audio wrangling
Please note we've left the Electron dev console on, because you'll probably need it. Turn it off before you release!
Use this app along with the PixiJS tutorials and the Electron API Demos app for API code examples to help you get started.
Getting started:
- Go through the basic quick start of Electronjs
- Get familiar with the Atom.io editor
- Clone this and run it
- Experiment with native building features of electron-build and related add-ons
Maybe this video will help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-oN_YI3KIE
This starting place for a Pixitron game is implemented in these files:
package.json- Points to the app's main file and lists its details and dependencies.main.js- Starts the app and creates a browser window to render HTML. This is the app's main process.engine.js- Contains a ready-to-be-extended game engine that hooks "ESC" key to "Quit"interface.js- Keyboard and mouse wranglingdrawing.js- Where to put reusable drawing apparatusrenderer.js- Came with the Electron Quick Startindex.html- A web page to render. This is the app's renderer process.
You can learn more about each of these components within the Quick Start Guide and by looking into the award-winning PixiJS v4.
To clone and run this repository you'll need Git and Node.js (which comes with npm) installed on your computer. From your command line:
# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/LAGameStudio/pixitron
# Go into the repository
cd pixitron
# Install dependencies
npm install
# Run the app
npm startNote: If you're using Linux Bash for Windows, see this guide or use node from the command prompt.
- Includes a custom Engine class for structural organization and window setup for quickly starting a fullscreen game app in Electron
- PixiJS cross-platform game engine for 2D and WebGL games
- For spatial audio and audio sprites: Howler.js
- For gamepad support: jsgamepad
- Great all-inclusive keyboard bindings setup
- Z-ordering display groups for making 2.5D games
- Steam API for Nodejs npm install --save steam-api
There's a 20 video YouTube series on integrating Pixitron with a JSON back-end to host multiplayer games:
- Learning Pixi by Kitty Kat Attack - great place to start
- PixiJS Tutorials from PixiJS.com - more learnin' fun'
- A book on PixiJS - learn by chopping trees! (or get it on a kindle) Learn Pixi.js: Create Great Interactive Graphics for Games and the Web Paperback (Published 5 Nov 2015)
- Pixi.io Shader Filters - Use shaders to spice up your 2D engine
- Many Examples - from PixiJS.com
- Awesome Video and Article - A gentle introduction to shaders with pixi-js
- electronjs.org/docs - all of Electron's documentation
- electronjs.org/community#boilerplates - sample starter apps created by the community
- electron/electron-quick-start - a very basic starter Electron app
- electron/simple-samples - small applications with ideas for taking them further
- electron/electron-api-demos - an Electron app that teaches you how to use Electron
- hokein/electron-sample-apps - small demo apps for the various Electron APIs
It's a mix of MIT and CC0 1.0 (Public Domain) licensing. See all licensing here