If you've tried to build something in Godot or Unity, you know how frustrating these IDEs are for beginners. They're built around 3D engines, and making simple 2D games is like pulling teeth. On the other hand, completely visual IDEs like Scratch are a misery to work with due to their inflexible design. Fantasy consoles are like PICO-8 and TIC-80 are fantastic, but they're really geared towards Game Boy Color-sized experiences.
We need a middle-ground for making hi-res 2D stuff again. An IDE that's as easy to use as Visual Basic, that lets you drag'n'drop window elements and game objects with ease. An IDE that doesn't require watching 25 hours of crappy Youtube coding tutorials to render a hello world scene. We had all of this in the mid-90s, and we forgot how much user interfaces mattered for the average kid who just wanted to goof around and make stuff. Something as easy as HyperCard, but as robust as Visual Basic.
EXiGY rolls up the all of the above experiences into a single package: make games the way they were made in the mid-90s, by dragging and dropping objects into a window, programming some behaviour into those objects, and clicking the Run button. It's like ZZT with tile graphics instead of ASCII. EXiGY is a game engine, IDE, and construction kit, all rolled up into a tiny package.
RSS feed: https://exigy.org/rss.xml
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. Has an intuitive user interface that stays out of your way. The docks and panels can be moved and customized for your specific workflow. Once you have your setup, you can save it as your own workspace. You can also create your own shortcuts for commonly used tools. Over 100 professionally made brushes, stabilizers for them in case your hand isn't the steadiest, built-in vector drawing tools, customizable and constructable brushes, wrap-around mode for seamless textures, and a resource manager to import and export tools and packs from other users.
Supports 2d animation. Multiple layers and audio support, thousands of frames on the video timeline, onion skinning for tweening, drag-and-drop of frames, shortcuts, and performance tweaking.
Source code: https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita
asciimatics is a cross platform package to do curses-like operations, plus higher level APIs and widgets to create text UIs and ASCII art animations.
It brings a little joy to anyone who was programming in the 80s... Oh and it provides a single cross-platform Python class to do all the low-level console function you could ask for, including coloured and styled text, cursor positioning and manipulation, keyboard interaction, mouse input, console resizing, anti-aliased line drawing, sprites, animation, particle systems, and UI widgets.
pyglet is a powerful, yet easy to use Python library for developing games and other visually-rich applications on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It supports windowing, user interface event handling, Joysticks, OpenGL graphics, loading images and videos, and playing sounds and music. All of this with a friendly Pythonic API, that's simple to learn and doesn't get in your way.
Github: https://github.com/pyglet/pyglet
VHS is a tool for creating GIFs that can be used to demo CLI tools. But what if we used it to do something different? Like re-create some classic scifi movie scenes. Such as Trinity using NMAP in the Matrix or hacking WOPR in War Games? This project has some VHS tapes that generate:
- Neo receiving messages from Trinity in the Matrix
- Trinity hacking using NMAP
- Hacking WOPR in War Games
- WOPR realising Thermonuclear war is a mugs game
- Dennis Nedry's terminal in Jurassic Park
- Ripley asking about Special Order 937
An article that teaches how to add CSS animations to hyperlinks.
A collection of CSS3 powered hover effects to be applied to links, buttons, logos, SVG, featured images and so on. Easily apply to your own elements, modify or just use for inspiration. Available in CSS, Sass, and LESS.
Github: https://github.com/IanLunn/Hover
Maybe I can use this for links?
This is a list of small, free, or experimental tools that might be useful in building your game / website / interactive project. Although I’ve included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools and toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
A Pixel Art Editor. Self hosted. Single page app. Draw old-school pixel art by hand in your web browser, save the images locally. Can assemble frames into an animated gif. Can even import an image file and turn it into an approximate pixel art image. Can be installed as a progressive web app but good luck getting those to work.
Create custom animated emoji out of existing images. Handles the animation for you based upon the kind you pick, you don't have to do the animation yourself.
A series of awesome little special effects for websites. Not limited to any framework (react, vue, angular, etc). Effects can be simply inserted into the page.
A wiki that catalogs lost media - stuff that you saw on television or heard on the radio once, and then never encountered again.
Piskel is an online, opensource (https://github.com/juliandescottes/piskel) pixel art and animated game sprite editor in the 8bit style. By manipulating discrete pixels in your web browser you can draw and animate c64 and nintendo style sprites, preview the animation, export them to animated gif files, and download them to incorporate into your own games.