LDG

Today I'm happy to announce Diggy, an open source game engine written in JavaScript. Embedded below is Bombada, a game made with Diggy:

(Works best in Chrome or Safari.)

More about Diggy

The name "Diggy" came from DGE, which stands for DHTML Game Engine. It's a relatively full-featured game engine meant to empower developers to rapidly produce browser-based games.

You've already seen what Diggy can do, so here's what it is not:

• A DOM selector.
• An event manager.
• A canvas or SVG library.
• Useful for standard web apps.
• Meant to do anything but make DOM games.
• Very stable or ready to make enterprise games.
• Still in development (at least by me).

(There are also known issues to be aware of.)

More about Bombada

As you may have read previously, I'm an amateur game developer. I've never shipped a "real" game and Bombada is a baby step towards fixing that. Here's more about the project:

• Bombada was orginally intended as an iPhone game (hence the 480x320 resolution).
• Bombada was also intended to work with node (hence match3.js being a separate file and attaching to the exports object).
• 99% of the code was written from scratch by me, with some exceptions being the easing library (borrowed from the YUI2 library) and the JSON parser.
• I also made the graphics, which are free to use but have some Creative Commons restrictions.
• The music and sound effects were made by Joshua Morse, a freelance music composer. Hire him, he's fantastic.

Bombada ended up taking about 7 months of part-time development. But it's not that complex, so why did it take so long? Partly because as a fulltime web developer, I don't have a lot of free time. But also partly because I was building Diggy along with it, so in theory any future games could be built much more rapidly.

I love postmortems, so I may write one up eventually comprised of what worked, what failed, and any valuable lessons learned. If that's something that would interest you, please let me know in the comments.

Those links again please?

• Diggy game engine source code on GitHub.
• Bombada puzzle game source code on GitHub.
• Play Bombada in its own window.

Edit 7/6/2010: Bombada composer Joshua Morse has put his excellent original soundtrack on sale over at Bandcamp. It's a steal at just $3 (or more if you're feeling generous).

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