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itch.io Community » Game Development » Devlogs

The Superpowers game maker #MegaThread!

A topic by Elisée created Nov 30, 2015 Views: 26,245 Replies: 74
Viewing posts 1 to 33
Elisée8 years ago (7 edits) (+9)

Hello fellow itchies and welcome to the Superpowers Mega Thread! If you're like me and have never megathreaded before, Amos shared some great tips. Basically we should all post a lot and then I guess the megathread inspector stops by one day and we get accreditation and stuff.

What is Superpowers?

Superpowers is a downloadable HTML5 2D+3D game making program. You can use it solo like a regular offline game maker, or setup a password and let friends join in on your project through their Web browser. It's great for working together over long periods of time, for jamming over a weekend, or just for helping each other out with debugging!


A screenshot of Superpowers editing Murder at the Residence Gudul

We've built the Superpowers Game engine (standing on the shoulders of giants like Three.js) and a bunch of asset editors for it. But the coolest thing is this: Superpowers itself is actually engine-agnostic. It's just a piece of software for collaborating on projects and you can add project types and plugins to it.

People can make their own engine and editors for Superpowers. There's a Superpowers LÖVE project type and we are toying with building a Phaser.js one too, or even weird ideas like a collaborative slideshow editor, a collaborative mod editor for some games, etc.

How do I get it?

Superpowers is open source. You can download it for free on superpowers-html5.com.

You can support us with a donation on itch.io or by supporting us on Patreon.

And now, let the megathread begin!

I thought I'd start things off by writing a bit about me and how I came to Superpowers, and then maybe everyone else can chime in and share their experience and questions and screenshots and stuff. Continued in the next post!

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Elisée8 years ago (1 edit) (+5)

Hi I'm Elisée

I'm 26 and I live in Strasbourg, France. Almost 20 years ago I made my first games in QBasic on Windows 95 after borrowing a programming book with funny monsters in it. I guess stealing is the correct word, since I forgot to return it... oops. Long story short, I was hooked and I've been game-programming ever since.

CraftStudio

Fast-forward four years ago, I ended up unemployed and, inspired by Minecraft's approachable blockiness, I decided to go full-time indie and started building a blocky online collaborative game maker named CraftStudio. The idea: let people make games together all in one (virtual) place!

It was a scary big complex project, but lots of nice people were kind enough to support my work, and it turned into something pretty cool. I met great folks and we did jams and games together and it was good.

Teaming up

After almost three years of fighting this adventure of a project, I was getting pretty frustrated with working alone and CraftStudio had become a big thing that I wish I could improve but it was limited by its original design. So after a lot of "what if" and "hey maybe" and quite a few "no wait that's crazy", I asked friends to join me and maybe let's start from scratch and make a new super awesome game maker together?! And that's how Bilou and Pixel-boy ended up moving in from the other side of the country and how we got started on Superpowers. Crazy.

Suddenly, Superpowers

So we made big plans and got to work, building on 3 years of experience making and using CraftStudio.

In December 2014, after like 4 months of work, we used a rudimentary version of Superpowers to build Hunt the Yeti. In March 2015, we launched a crowdfunding campaign and we've been surviving on that. (Thank you so so much to everyone who will read this and contributed in one way or another, through donations or otherwise. You rock ♥)

We're now very close to making our initial vision come to life: open sourcing Superpowers so that everyone can use it and contribute to it directly. Our dream of building a free extensible platform for making development tools and collaborating on games or other creative stuff is almost there!! I hope all kinds of indie developers will use it and build on it and contribute improvements to it :).

If you're already onboard or interested or even a little bit intrigued, please share your stories, projects, ideas and questions in this thread!

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Amos8 years ago(+6)

(Just spamming the thread some to let everyone know that games exported from superpowers play very nicely with as-of-yet-unreleased secret itch.io stuff, in case you were wondering)

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

True! And I should mention you can publish Superpowers games to mobile app stores (Android, iOS, etc.) using the Intel XDK.

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tesselode8 years ago(+1)

Superpowers looks pretty cool on its own, but modding it into an editor for other engines has me really intrigued. Do you think someone could make it worth with LÖVE? Because if so, then that is my new goal in life.

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Elisée8 years ago(+2)

Yes, most definitely. The browser couldn't start your native Lua interpreter directly because of security restrictions but it should totally work when using the Superpowers app. When running the project, you'd call out to LOVE.exe or whatever and point it at the exported game.

We'll be putting out some example "systems" (that's how we call project types in the codebase) and documentation in the next few weeks. I might do a very basic LÖVE one, seems like a great fit!

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ggspringer8 years ago(+1)

Extremely interested in this! Not that I don't think the Superpowers engine is great but the idea of being able to use the same tools cross engine when/if needed, sounds amazing! Just wanted to throw out there that I am interested in this and would love to see how you would implement this for other Engines!

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Doomcaster8 years ago (1 edit) (+4)

Since this is a new thread, on a new community, I'll introduce myself too!

I'm Luke! I'm 22 and living in Idaho, United States. I've been attempting to make decent games since late 2014 but I've made pixel art for a few years before that. I didn't even know game development communities or online tutorials were really a thing until 2013 (dial-up. UGH). Oh, and I'm somewhat colorblind. I don't know what severity or what type, but I easily confuse certain shades of colors:

  • blues-purples
  • bright yellows-greens
  • medium to dark greens-oranges-browns (very slight)
  • browns-reds
  • cyan-whites/grays
  • dark reds-black in certain cases

What I consider "purple" is probably your "magenta"... or something like that :D

I've been using Superpowers since June 6th (seems like just yesterday :O) and it's improved a lot since then. I've only re-released one game with it so far (I'm really slow at making games, haha), and it was quite the learning curve coming from Game Maker Studio. I'm really glad I made the switch so far, since I've learned more about programming in general than I knew before! I really like Typescript now, and don't think I'm switching anytime soon without a good reason.

I made the switch from Game Maker because the idea of using an opensource engine seemed like the best way to go. Easily port to multiple systems, built-in development GUI, play games in your browser, use existing JavaScript libraries, collaborations... Oh, and community-made resources like plugins, bug-fixes, custom engines, documentation, tutorials, etc. I have a feeling that once Superpowers goes opensource, it's gonna be pretty successful :D

I also want to thank the Sparklin Labs team while I'm here, for all the work they've put into it so far and for the helping me out on Reddit and Twitter! I've been subscribed to their Trello board for a while now, and I know they've been working really hard to make Superpowers great :D

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NotExplosive8 years ago(+5)

Hiya!

I've been using Superpowers since the beginning and I've got a... handful of presentable projects to show off. Most of them are unfinished, but that's just because I get bored of things easily and University is hard.

Here's my first big project, intended to be an exploratory narrative driven type game. I got hung up around the time I realized I didn't really have a good story to write and I was totally dependent on my friend to create my art assets.

So then here's my second big project, a 2D platformer hack and slasher that I hope to return to someday, currently it's on hold simply because my schoolwork has taken precedence over my gamemmaking. (This project uses Superpowers' provided "ArcadePhysics2D" which is really easy to use and saved me a ton of time!)

But if you prefer something more interactive and playable here's a garbage game I made for my university's gamejam. I'm not even a little bit proud of it, but it exists. My themes were "Space" and "Oatmeal" so I didn't really have a lot to work with.

I'm usually pretty active in the community skype chat and am usually the first to complain about point out bugs as I find them in the editor.

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SolarLune8 years ago(+2)

Heh, I like Sw4rds. There's something very immediate about how heavy and solidly the player moves. It feels like it could be a cool strategic action game.

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NotExplosive8 years ago(+1)

I have big plans for this game. :D

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Jeasonfire8 years ago(+2)

This is looking really cool, I've been searching for something like this for a while now. I've started using TypeScript very recently, and I love that this also uses it! Sadly, I don't have the money to buy in to early access, but I'm very eagerly awaiting the free release :)

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NotExplosive8 years ago(+3)

Soooooooon!

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Elisée8 years ago(+6)

Rebuilding our website... in Superpowers!

Since we're going to be redoing our website for the open source launch, rather than do things the old fashioned way, I started working on a static website project type for Superpowers today. It outputs good old HTML5 and CSS when you export!

I built editors for Jade (HTML templating) and Stylus (CSS with nesting support), reusing the collaborative text editor widget Bilou wrote. It is powered by CodeMirror on the frontend and his operational-transform library on the backend.

I had to implement a couple of terrible hacks to virtualize the filesystem for Jade and Stylus compilation, hot-swapping the default implementation of fs.readFileSync just before calling their render functions. It sucks, I'm not proud (ok maybe just a little bit) but it works and it's just a few lines so it should be easy to improve later on! Jade 2.0 will provide a proper virtual filesystem, whenever it comes out, hopefully Stylus will follow suit.

Next up: images, i18n

I think I'll be adding an editor for uploading images, webfonts or any other blobs that you might want to have on your websites. Then probably a JSON editor and some kind of customizable wiring for making localized websites.

Hopefully it'll all work out and SparklinLabs.com will be built with Superpowers by the end of December. That would be preeeetty cool!

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Doomcaster8 years ago(+1)

This is gonna be epic :D

I've been using Bitbucket to host my site for a few months. It's just a simple static page with links, but using Superpowers it'd be way simpler to make some changes and use SourceTree to upload it. My current method is to make changes, wait for the site to update in around 5-20 mins and make more changes. (another reason my site hasn't been updated since I first designed it in June)

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Greg Klein8 years ago (1 edit)

Awesome. I've been looking for an alternative from Unity and Twine. How does the support/ease of use compare to something like HaxeFlixel or Canvas?

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Elisée8 years ago

I don't know much about HaxeFlixel. In a general way, the approach we took for the Superpowers Game engine is similar to Unity's: you work with actors (game objects) and components. I'd say the workflow is simpler and lighterweight though, as the scene editor isn't the be-all and end-all. Instead, each asset has its own editor and you can easily work with multiple scenes at once. The scripting experience is great with autocompletion, live error reporting, a built-in API browser, and debugging is very nicely powered by Chrome's dev tools. Any specific points you'd like to know about?

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DasBilligeAlien8 years ago(+1)

When I am not broke anymore I will definetly throw some money at you. I collect game making tools :D

Really hyped for superpowers as I absolutly love collaboration in google docs. A visual scripting tool would be awesome as it is hard to find a coder for some reason (no money, I know :D ) But some small projects should be doable.

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Elisée8 years ago

Visual scripting is something I hope will be tackled at some point, either by us or someone from the community. There are many ways to go about it (node-based, puzzle pieces, event sheets, ...) and hopefully we'll end up with one or more cool implementations :)

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DasBilligeAlien8 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I use Construct 2 (event sheet) and Blueprint in UE4 (node based). I like both systems. Can't say which one I like more. But Blueprint is very very well made. (A bit complicated as everything in UE)

Sometimes I have the feeling the authors of these systems forget that the enduser is not nessesarily a coder. Construct is much better at giving a noob friendly start.

The longer I think about it, the more I like the node based approach. The conncetion lines are extremly helpful to understand what interacts with each other. The visual feedback is more akin to my education as a graphics designer.

A lot of very usefull tools still feel designed from a coder perspective instead from a users (artists, designers). Maybe I am just an interface fanatic :D


Thank you and your team for your hard work. Cant wait to get my hands on it :)

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Nallebeorn8 years ago

Superpowers looks really nice, indeed! Just a quick question, since I'm not all too familiar with Three.js... It Three used for 2d as well? And, more importantly, will Superpowers games (created with the "default" engine or whatever you'd call it) run without WebGL, using only canvas?

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

The default game engine (which we call "Superpowers Game" because we're very creative with names :D) uses Three.js in WebGL mode for both 2D and 3D. There isn't really a deep distinction between 2D and 3D in this case, except for using orthographic cameras. So no, games made with it wouldn't run with just Canvas 2D support.

A Phaser-based project type would, though. we've started putting one together, should come out fairly soon after we open source!

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rsbrowndog8 years ago

When Superpowers becomes free, will the asset packs you've released so far be included, or are you keeping those just for supporters?

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Elisée8 years ago

We'll be releasing the existing asset packs to everyone for free. We might still have some special ones for supporters going forward though!

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rsbrowndog8 years ago

I've got to admit that I was kind of hoping you'd say "NO!" so I could justify purchasing Superpowers when you've said that the open source release is imminent. I know I should really be rewarding you guys for all your hard work, but I'm on a tight budget here!

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Elisée8 years ago

. If you want to help out, once it's out there in a few weeks, getting the word out will be very helpful too!

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Veselekov8 years ago(+1)

Awesome stuff

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Elisée8 years ago (3 edits) (+7)

Hey friends. Thanks for all the nice comments!

This week was a hard one... our little feline fella Monsieur Chat passed away. He's been ill for a long time, but it took a sudden turn for the worse a few days ago. We're heartbroken but we've been keeping busy nonetheless. What else to do?

Lingua franca

We've added internationalization support to Superpowers! It was a quite a bit of work, and now it's a matter of replacing all hard-coded strings with localization IDs. Our friends Les Chats Cosmiques ("The Cosmic Cats") will be contributing the initial French translation (saving us a lot of time we can spend on other important work!), and obviously we'll be taking contributions for any language as soon as we open source :)


Screenshot of my local server hub, mostly translated in French. Notice the language chooser in the top right, too.

Translation files are simple JSON dictionaries. We'll have a guide with details about how to contribute.

Superpowers is getting a new home

There's been more work on the new website and we've registered a proper domain name for Superpowers. Behold... superpowers-html5.com! Obviously there will be actual content soon :) Do you like it?


The Superpowers Web project type I've been building works great. You can find the website's source project on GitHub as well as the exported version in the GitHub Pages branch. The system itself will be released alongside Superpowers in the coming weeks!

Redesigning the Sparklin Labs logo

I designed the old company logo back in 2012, when I was on my own and it's not up to par with Pixel-boy's awesome art for Superpowers, so it was time to redesign it.


On the left, the old Sparklin Labs logo. On the right, a monochrome version of the new one.

And here are various stages of the redesign with a color version in the bottom right corner, too:

What do you think? Do you like it? Do you hate it?

Behind the scenes...

As always, we're doing a lot of work that doesn't make a visible difference for most people but keeping the codebase healthy is important and will make contributing to Superpowers a pleasure.

We've gotten rid of the numerous `gulpfile.js` build scripts for plugins. Each plugin can now declare its own build process in a `package.json` file, under the "build" script, and there's a single reusable `pluginGulpfile.js` in the core repository that you can point to, if you're working with Jade, Stylus and TypeScript like we are. It handles all the various cases, like having zero, one or more editors, as well as localization.

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Doomcaster8 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

The new localization support sounds great, the more the merrier! The new site looks really good. With all these improvements, it feels like Superpowers going opensource is really happening, and I can't wait to see more people start using it :D

I saw the logo on twitter but forgot to say anything about it! I like the non-color version because it's more usable when it comes to matching the theme of individual games / colors, but the color version looks really awesome too!

The loss of a pet always sucks, and it takes a bit of time to recover from it. :( I know when I lost my dog a few years ago, spending time with family and friends, and talking about the past helped me get through most of the worse days. I hope you all feel better soon <3

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

Thanks Luke! :)

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Elisée8 years ago (3 edits) (+7)

Hey y'all! It's happening!! We've got a date to announce!

January 7, 2016 - Superpowers v1.0 will be released as open source software!!!


Whatever. ... just kidding! We're very excited for everyone to play with it, and to start accepting contributions! Now back to work, we gotta get this thing ready

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DasBilligeAlien8 years ago

Yay! Can't wait! (aka can't afford :D)

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herio8 years ago

sweet i been wating to try it =D looks so cool

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eigenbom8 years ago(+2)

Just dropping by to say Hi and I'm super excited for you guys :) You know I've been a big fan since Craftstudio and I wish you guys all the best!

Here's a strange idea: Run a superpowers server as a 'game'. Have thousands of people connect to it and play with the world by modifying the assets etc. Thoughts?

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Elisée8 years ago

Thanks Ben! :)

Here's a strange idea: Run a superpowers server as a 'game'. Have thousands of people connect to it and play with the world by modifying the assets etc. Thoughts?

Sounds like it could be fun... but you might have a lot of problems with griefing! :D Working with 10 people at once is manageable, if they have good intentions. Random people, and thousands of them... I'm not optimistic :P

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eigenbom8 years ago(+2)

Haha, well I am optimistic. I can imagine it working well under various constraints, e.g.: a user joins, a new room is generated and attached to a dungeon, the user can only add things within the bounds of that space. An auto-moderator tracks the changes and only applies them globally if the rules are followed. Easy to grief but so be it. ;)

Another idea: everyone builds their own self-contained worlds (based on some common template) and a global portal world connects them up. A voting system shows a score above the portals so you know what you're getting into when you walk through a door.

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neat things8 years ago(+2)

I'll definitely be checking this out once that Phaser module comes along! Seems like you made a genius choice in allowing people to bring their own toys to the table, should open this up to a lot more people as a valuable option.

Keep up the good work, I'm super excited!

[sorry for the bad pun...]

:)

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

Thanks a lot! Yeah I'm so glad we've managed to create a platform that will help people build and collaborate with some of the tools they already use too :). Phaser and LOVE are great and if we can complement them with a high-quality tooling (and real-time collaboration!), that'll be awesome.

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Heartbeast8 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I'm excited to see where this goes, guys! Keep up the great work. I'll be downloading it and messing around with it for sure come Jan 7th.

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MomoyoSeiso8 years ago(+1)

Sounds like a cool idea, I'm curious how this is going to work. Good luck! I'll make sure to keep tabs on Superpowers. :D

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Elisée8 years ago (2 edits) (+4)

Hi! Thanks for all the warm messages. You folks are awesomely supportive!

Ludum Dare 34

Pixel-boy, Bilou and I took part in Ludum Dare with help from our friends Alexis and Romain, using the Superpowers Game engine.

The result is Snow World, a 2-button tactical RPG, for 1-2 players!



Several other Superpowers games were made for Ludum Dare. I've started putting together a collection of Superpowers games on itch.io, but there are more hosted elsewhere, too. Feel free to post your own in this thread!

Progress on open sourcing

We've created the future open source repositories on GitHub for January 7. You can star them already, if you're into that

Community has been a big deal for us for a loooong time. CraftStudio (Superpowers's ancestor) has had a community chat in the app from the beginning and it's made many collaborations and friendships possible and we've been missing it in Superpowers. I've posted rough launcher redesign mockups on Trello to fix that and various other things. Hopefully we can get a first pass done in time for the open source release.

We've fixed several bugs and improved the user experience of some editors (script, font, shader, behavior component) during and after Ludum Dare :) Jams are great for finding and fixing papercuts!

Oh and Pixel-boy will be working on an animated trailer, so get hyped for that!!

Using Superpowers to put slideshows together, together

Every week we do a livestream to share our work (in French! if there's enough demand, we might start one in English next year...). We used to prepare slides as a static website each time but it took a while and it wasn't easy to collaborate on it so we gave it up.

Now that Superpowers is mature enough, we've built MarkSlide, a new system that lets you write Markdown slideshows collaboratively. It saves so much time and now we can all pitch in! \:D/

It's just one of the many uses we're hoping will emerge around Superpowers, it makes me very excited for the future ^_^

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DasBilligeAlien8 years ago(+1)

Your Ludum Dare entry is awesome A bit hard but really cool.

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

Thanks! Yeah we had little time for balancing it sadly, but it's definitely possible to win if you try hard enough!

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Doomcaster8 years ago(+2)


Happy Holidays!

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NotExplosive8 years ago(+1)

That's adorable!

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

I've said it on Twitter but I'll say it again: love it :D Cheers!

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duderbrolomando358 years ago

hey i was trying this out and i had a question, how do you type or include member variables to the Sup,Actor class?


Such as let healthvar = 100; and somehow access with the

let ActorGuy = new Sup.Actor("Test1")


and giving it that variable and accessing it later with stuff like Test1.healthvar += 1; (in some behavior script in an update function somewhere)


im very confused, also not sure where the main help thread for this software is.... im not used to typescript but trying to learn and I read how you declare objects in ECMA5 or whatever and it said you do

object = {

key: this,

key: that,

key: donelastkeyhere


}


and youd reference them within that way, but im not 100% sure. I'm trying to build a game just using code and C++ is giving me pains so i switched to typescript to see how it'd work and it seems to be similar in pain but without the awful linker issues.

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

Hi! We had setup a subreddit for Superpowers help but it's not very convenient so we're in the process of setting up new forums right here on itch.io community, they'll go live pretty soon :) In the meantime, I can answer your question right here.

So just to give some context, actors are made of a few things:

  • a name ("Test 1" for instance) and potentially a parent actor
  • a transform (position, rotation, scale)
  • a list of components

In order to attach some state and/or logic to an actor, you can use a behavior, which is a type of component (there are other types too, like a sprite renderer to name one).

// First we declare a new behavior class.
// It can be used on any number of actors
class MyCustomBehavior extends Sup.Behavior {
  health = 100;

  takeDamage(amount) {
    this.health -= amount;
  }
}
Sup.registerBehavior(MyCustomBehavior);

// Then we create an actor
let actor = new Sup.Actor("Test 1");
// And we attach an instance of our behavior class to it
actor.addBehavior(MyCustomBehavior);

// Later on, if we want to access the health member variable on the behavior, we can write:
Sup.log(actor.getBehavior(MyCustomBehavior).health);

// And we can call methods on the behavior like so:
actor.getBehavior(MyCustomBehavior).takeDamage(5);

As you can see, using "someActor.getBehavior" is useful when your global initialization code needs to call methods or access member variables on a particular behavior. It is also useful if you have one behavior that needs to act on another actor's behavior, for instance, when an enemy hits a player, or vice versa.

We should probably add such an example to the documentation at docs.sparklinlabs.com/en/getting-started/variables...

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duderbrolomando358 years ago

Ok, if I'm understanding this right, to get a behavior it must be printed to superpowers log using Sup.Log(<value retrieved somewhere stored>) which can be an actor so Sup.log(<ActiorName>.getBehavior(<BehaviorName>).<VariableName>); and lets say I wanted to run update tests against this value or another value (like its position overlapping a damaging tile) I would run positional checks in code against the Superpowers Actor class (Sup.Actor which I created as "Test1" for instance) and then in a if conditional


if Sup.log(Sup.log(actor.getBehavior(MyCustomBehavior).CustomX) == Sup.log(Sup.log(EnemyActor?.getBehavior(MyCustomBehavior).CustomX) // Can the engine differentiate collisions and run these functions from each object?

{

let tempVar = Sup.log(actor.getBehavior(MyCustomBehavior).health);

actor.getBehavior().<custom_method>(param0, etc);


//Define method here>>>>>>???


//Or is the method a script that is loaded before this is run or after?

}


sorry for the newbie questions, Ive been learning programming but working with pre-built engine environments is just as confusing to me sometimes but is usually far less work which is why I am trying to learn to use everything I can. For instance game maker/unity work alot like this but still sometime confuses me.

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Elisée8 years ago (1 edit)

No, you don't need to use Sup.log! It was an example, to show how to do something concrete after getting a behavior (in this case, Sup.log displays a member variable's value in the browser's development tools, but you could be doing any number of things instead).

If you haven't already, looking at some of the demo projects might help: http://docs.sparklinlabs.com/en/resources/demo-pro... and https://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/profile/reposit...

Regarding collisions, there is a built-in axis-aligned bounding box collision system called ArcadePhysics2D. You can find a tutorial here: http://docs.sparklinlabs.com/en/tutorials/collisio...

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Elisée8 years ago(+3)

Helloooo!

Things have been a bit quiet with the holidays, but we're back. There is code to write, trailers to make and bugs to fix!

Superpowers LÖVE

I've been writing some documentation for systems and plugins development and I realized we should make sure that things aren't going to change too much once we start supporting other engines.

So I spent some time building a basic LÖVE system for Superpowers. What is LÖVE? 🎵It is a sweet 2D Lua game framework. Its 0.10 release was just announced with mobile support!

I reused the media importer I wrote for Superpowers Web earlier this month and turned the Jade editor into a Lua editor. Pretty straightforward! The main challenge was getting the games to run. I added a button on first run to ask where the LÖVE executable is located:


Once LÖVE has been found, the system's runtime simply downloads all the assets, puts them in a temporary folder and points LÖVE to it. Here's a GIF showing a tutorial game I found online and manually imported into Superpowers:


Pretty cool? :) We've put the source code for the Superpowers LÖVE system on GitHub right away. Enjoy!

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Elisée8 years ago (2 edits) (+4)

36 hours from Open Source

Hey y'all! Just a quick word to remind you we're just over a day away from Superpowers's first open source release!!

Alright, back to work! See you VERY soon

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Sparklin Labs8 years ago(+4)

Can you believe it? Today's the day!

Holy moly. It's happening in less than 10 hours!

Superpowers goes open source at noon PST / 3pm EST

We'll be live at hitbox.tv/SparklinLabs to press the big red button, demo it all, launch our Patreon, talk about contributing and future plans. We'll be speaking in French but we'll have slides in English and we've got some people on call to translate it all for you in the chat.

See you then! Can't. wait. ♥

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nounoursheureux8 years ago(+1)

I am trying Superpowsers, but I haven't found any documentation on how to build/run the desktop app. I have Electron installed but I don't know what I need to do to run Superpowers with Electron.

I really like it so far, and I hope I will be able to contribute (even though I have no experience with TypeScript, but this is the perfect occasion to learn :P)

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Elisée8 years ago

Ah right, we need to add this to the documentation. Try this:

# Run this one just once
npm install -g electron-prebuilt

# Then, assuming you're already in the superpowers root folder
cd launcher
electron .
That should start the launcher!
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nounoursheureux8 years ago(+1)

Yup it works ! Thanks :)

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Amos8 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Did you steal my gif?

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Elisée8 years ago(+1)

No I made this.

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narrow8 years ago

Hey! Question, How do people join my server so they can help edit our game?

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Elisée8 years ago (1 edit)

Hey! See Letting others join your server in the docs: http://docs.superpowers-html5.com/en/getting-start...

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Elisée8 years ago

v0.19.0 — A week of Open Source

Phew! That was another long day. It's been just under a week since Superpowers was open sourced and it's been busy as hell.

Here's Superpowers v0.19.0! Check out the release notes: https://github.com/superpowers/superpowers/releases/tag/v0.19.0

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narrow8 years ago

Is there any way I can share my server without usuing the ip? can't we use hamachi or something?

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Elisée8 years ago

I suppose Hamachi should work, I haven't tested it!

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narrow8 years ago

oh, ok! thanks for replying!

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narrow8 years ago

Just didn't want to to reveal my location to my friend, I don't trust them THAT much.

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Elisée8 years ago (1 edit)

What happened this week?

Since we're hosting a weekly livestream in French, we thought it'd make sense to have something for the English community too.

Doing a second livestream in English would take a lot of time and effort so instead,
we've just kicked off a weekly community report on our new wiki!
Check it out, it's called: This Week in Superpowers #1!

Lots of games and contributions being made :)

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Elisée8 years ago (1 edit) (+2)

Hey! I haven't posted here in a little while!

Make sure to check out This Week in Superpowers #2 and This Week in Superpowers #3 for the latest development and community news. Loooots of stuff has happened.


Last week end, we took part in the Global Game Jam and made Lumberjack Jacques and the Ritual of Doom.

Also, we've posted our first Secret Supporter Update on Patreon, featuring a sneak peek at our next game! :D

Project Sustainability

It's been a year and a half since the three of us started working on Superpowers. Thanks to generous support from the community on Patreon and during early access on Gumroad, we've been able to do it full-time so far. But with our current financial situation, we can't afford to keep going like that for much longer.

So we've been looking for work on the side, in order to continue this awesome beast of a project... and, well, good news! Bilou and I have found long-term gigs and Pixel-boy will be doing some contract work soon.

What does that mean? Well, we'll definitely have less time to spend on Superpowers every week. Buuuuut! now we don't have to worry so much about making rent every month, and it's remote work with a pretty flexible schedule so, short of being paid to work on Superpowers itself full-time, it's the best outcome we could hope for!

More Open Source work!

We'll do our very best to keep earning your support by releasing more cool open source stuff! On top of our ongoing work on Superpowers, we're recently open sourced, migrated to GitHub and/or improved:

When's the next release?

Check out the latest edition of This Week in Superpowers for info about the next release and why we haven't pushed out a v0.20 yet.

Talk to you soon! ♥

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Jeff Ledwin8 years ago

I usually consider myself a developer (despite that I'm not in high school yet), even though I don't know much about any other coding languages beside simple Visual Basic (VB) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML). When I go onto YouTube or any other website to find documentation or tutorials, I see a big gap between beginners and experts. The tutorials either assume you know advanced coding or none at all, which annoys me. I also don't have the money for a tutor or website membership. I have noticed that Superpowers has been released for free now, and I am "intrigued" by this program. It does look great in terms of GUI, and it looks really simple in that screenshot. I just downloaded Superpowers for Windows from right here on itch.io, but I'm stuck at the setup process. I went to the Setting up Superpowers documentation, and it said to "make sure to also edit the address of the "My Server" entry in the servers list to use the correct port (Syntax is ip:port)". When I put in my IP, it stopped working. It kept sending that connection timed out error. Is there any way to fix this?

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Sparklin Labs8 years ago

You should leave the default server address:

127.0.0.1:4237

The main launcher is being redesigned and the new version will be simpler to use.

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Jeff Ledwin8 years ago (1 edit)

Thanks, but it still doesn't work. It almost immediately connection refused.

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Sparklin Labs8 years ago
Ok, a couple things to check
  • Did you change the port in the settings tab? Make sure it says 4237 for the main port, and 4238 for build port.
  • Make sure the server starts? Did you uncheck auto-start? Any error listed at the bottom of the window?
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Jeff Ledwin8 years ago

Got it! Thanks a lot.

I didn't know this before, but clicking "start" and double-clicking the name do not have the same function as I thought (hey, I'm new to this).

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Sparklin Labs8 years ago (2 edits) (+3)

Hey! We have released Superpowers v1.0 with many new features and improvements — https://www.patreon.com/posts/superpowers-v1-0-614...

Cheers!

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Gogglehead8 years ago

Hello itchies! I'm a starter with Superpowers, and i'd just like some technical help. Using the 2D platformer that comes with the program, and using that as a starting point to my first game, i have one problem. Whenever i start the game it just shows a black screen.

Now! I have a scene set up! I have that scene set up at the starting scene through the settings, and i have the cameras set up in the scene, I even have it directly attached to the player, however the sprites and the tile map are still not showing on the startup, if it's even being started up. Can someone help me?

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Elisée8 years ago

Hi!

Go to 3D view and double-check the depth of the various actors. Make sure the camera's viewport contains the sprites on the Z axis. That's probably the issue.

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