Simple Game Framework

An object-oriented JavaScript framework to develop simple, shape and sprite based games

Simple Game Framework, or SGF for short, is an abstract JavaScript based API to develop retro 2D shape and sprite based games. The idea is that the game developer writes games using one code base, written in JavaScript, and incorporating the SGF API. That code base can then be deployed to any number of SGF game engine clients.

Game Engines

Currently Being Developed

• HTML/DOM: An engine that uses web browsers' native JavaScript engine to execute the game code, and the API manipulates DOM nodes to "render" your game. The HTML/DOM game engine can be found in src/html/.

• Java: In conjunction with Rhino, Java interprets your JavaScript game code, and uses Java2D or JOGL to render the game. The current version found in src/java/ uses Java2D to render SGF games.

Future Thoughts

• iOS: A game engine for Apple's line of hardware is high on the list of future plans. Apple allows JavaScript code to be executed in a native app as long as it's running through a WebKit instance. The plan is to render the game through Objective-C and OpenGL ES, and execute your game code through a WebKit instance inside a native app. This strategy (similar to PhoneGap's model) allows your SGF game to be accepted to the AppStore, even with Apple's revised 4.0 SDK License Agreement!

• Android: Native Android apps can also contain a WebKit instance, which will execute game code, and render to the device screen through OpenGL ES and Dalvik. In principal, the Android engine would be very similar to the Apple engine.

• HTML/Canvas2D: Using a lot of the same code as the HTML/DOM client, and rewriting the rendering code, we could create a client the renders to a <canvas> element using the 2D context. This would probably be slower than the HTML/DOM version, but I might make it at some point for demonstration purposes.

• HTML/WebGL: For probably the best speed in the web browser, we could create a client that renders the game using the draft WebGL. I've never touched OpenGL, but might look into this one once WebGL is more standard.

• C or C++ Based Player: For a pure speed solution, there could be a SGF game engine written in C or C++, and using V8/Nitro/SpiderMonkey to interpret game code. This would be the fastest version of the game engine. However, I (TooTallNate) have never programmed in C++, let alone developed games, so I probably won't be touching this one.

• Any other platform with a JavaScript Interpreter: In theory, your game written using the SGF API is reusable anywhere that JavaScript can be implemented! That's the beauty of developing your game in an interpreted language.

Game Development

A good supply of example games ranging from really simple, to show the basics of the API, to more complex, to show off the power of JavaScript and the SGF API itself can be found in the examples folder.

An SGF game starts with a folder with a main.js file inside. main.js is the first file loaded when your game starts. That is the only requirement to create an SGF game.

Additional game resources like additional *.js files, images and sound files can be placed inside that same folder, or any number of folders inside your root game folder (the folder where main.js is located).

You can view the full Simple Game Framework API Docs to learn it all!

Additional Links

• "Simple Game Framework" Google Group - The official mailing list dedicated to discussion of SGF game and engine development.
• GitHub SGF Wiki - The official Wiki for SGF, with community written guides/tutorials/examples and good-to-know SGF info.

License

SGF itself isn't really a code base, more like a concept or abstraction. If you know Java, then SGF itself is an abstract class, and all the game engine clients are the concrete implementations. As such, it doesn't really make sense to license SGF itself, but rather each game engine client should specify a license for its own code.

Furthermore, every game that is written with the SGF API and released to the masses should specify its own license. This is more related to software development in general, and not specifically SGF.