Public launch

guntis  Engine  1 Comment

For the last couple of months we have been working really hard with first MightyEngine adopters, adding important features and eliminating bugs. Finally we are ready to launch the public beta, so you can go and fork it on github.

Engine has built in editor which speeds up your workflow: managing assets, editing levels, deploy to web/ios/android, minify code, import/export projects, code editor, multi-user support. We take care of rendering and all the little details across many different browsers, it’s super fast and supports pixel perfect object manipulation, sprites, animations, filters and transformations, modular architecture, sound support and UI templating system. All features are listed here .

MightyEngine recently has been been involved in big project – HTML5 game portal with 50 games across web, ios and android platforms which will be launched at the end of this year. Meanwhile you can take a look at our newest demos .

We have also added CocoonJS support to experience games truly native way. Just one click and your game is deployed from editor and delivered as a native app to desired mobile device.

On the licensing side – non-commercial projects can use MightyEngine for FREE but for commercial games the license costs 100 EUR per coder.

We love indie developers. So if you have any special requests or a special situation we may be able to figure something out. Just send us a mail – info@mightyfingers.com .

The progress of HTML5 is exciting and we believe in its future. As a next step we are planning to add WebGL support to engine. That will enable us  to increase the performance and to run your games even faster. If the players browser does not support WebGL then engine will automatically fall-back to canvas version. Also development of visual UI editor is close to finish. It will save your valuable time by allowing you to put together UI with just a few hand movements. If you want to receive further engine progress updates then subscribe to our newsletter.

Sneak peek of MightyEditor

guntis  Engine  Leave a comment

As MightyEngine is finally nearing public launch and is getting quite a bit of requests for it, we have decided to start to introduce you to the engine.
First lets take a look at the MightyEditor, it is the content management tool for MightyEngine. You can play around with it here – http://editordemo.mightyfingers.com .

For demo purposes the functionality is limited and we’re resetting the projects every 24 hours.

HTML5 editor demo for assets, maps, ....

Let’s explore some of the functionality that the editor offers:

  • Asset management. An easy way to handle multiple textures(sprites) and sounds. We’re supporting animated textures and automatically handle various HTML5 sound formats for you so you don’t have to worry about browser support and file conversions.
  • Brushes. Add advanced effects and functionality to resources that can be added to entities.
  • Entities. Define custom objects and their parameters that can be placed in a game level. For example: the player, the terrain and other related objects.
  • Components. Add custom functionality which can be shared by multiple entities. Components are like entities only without any “physical” appearance.
  • Internationalization. Built-in internationalization support for your game (not available in the demo).
  • Level editor. Create top-down, isometric or side-scrolling levels with your defined entities.
  • Branches. Our editor handles multiple configurations and environments, which for an example, allows you to create different content for different servers or to create a debugging environment that does not impact the production version.
  • Deploy. Minifies, uglifies and makes optimized code for production with just one click.
  • Multi-user support. You can work as a team and simultaneously edit assets or create levels without having to worry about breaking stuff that is being created by other teammates .
  • Plugins. The engine has a modular architecture. This allows you to add your own plugins that can be configured and used directly from editor.

All of the parameters that are available in the demo can be easily extended and modified in order to fit MightyEngine  more to your needs.

In the near future we also plan to implement these things:

  • Even more improved rendering performance
  • Develop UI editor so you can create the UI for your game from within the editor. This will allow for a more streamlined  UI development without spending a lot of time polishing the UI across platforms.
  • Possibility to compile into a native application – iOS, Android, Windows Phone (currently in work in progress)

MightyDigger

guntis  Games  Leave a comment

A while ago MightyFingers won Garage48 hackaton where we got Samsung special prize.  Because of this grant we were able to start work on our game called MightyDigger . The goal was to ship the same game to web and mobile platforms and to test how MightyEngine behaves in real life situations. For first platform we chose social network based in Latvia – draugiem.lv and in just two weeks we got around 50’000 users playing our game. The next step is to launch MightyDigger in Samsung app store and Firefox market.

MightyDigger isn’t just a game, it’s also proof of the fact that you can build bigger 2D games on HTML5 and they are as good as flash based games (or even better). And soon after launching mobile version of MightyDigger and doing some more user testing we will be ready to publish our home brewed game engine!

One could ask why technology company is developing games. the answer is simple -. We want to field test the technology in real life situations and kill all of the bugs and flaws that could arise while developing and publishing any game that our users decide to make. For the first bigger scale test we can say – it went really well, we fixed some flaws the engine as well as improved the development/deployment process as a whole.

While testing we did run in some problems, that were not obvious in the smaller scale tests. The first issue popped out in the beginning. Somehow Firefox and Opera loaded game forever. Especially on older hardware. We realized that the game froze while creating map with a huge amount of tiles because it was very CPU intensive and sometimes even crashed the script. After realizing this issue we made some optimizations. After these optimisations our tests show that now we can run 1 million tile map without any problems http://mightyfingers.com/supermap/index.html . In next release we are planning to add even better algorithm that will allow you to use unlimited amount of tiles which will be be created and streamed dynamically.

Previously we have developed a few games using nodeJS but for MightyDigger we decided to stick to the good old PHP. It seemed like this kind of casual game requires more work on client side than server. Later on we regretted this decision because we had to duplicate quite a bit of code on both sides. In the end we once again came to the conclusion that nodeJS should be obvious choice not only for real time multiplayer games but also for more simple casual and social games.

Gamejam ‘13

guntis  Engine, GameJam, Javascript  5 Comments

Two from MightyFingers team – Māris and Arturs have spent last weekend at GameJam  hackaton. The purpose was not only to create a game but also test how much can be done with MightyEngine in very short time span. The game was made in HTML5 and JavaScript without using any third-party plugins.

In the end of the third day the teams from Latvia managed to deliver 15  playable games,  ranging from board games to cool 3D games that had flying dragons. The event was cool but exhausting. In the end we shipped “Dungeon of Hearts” and had a few hours to take a nap.

In “Dungeon of Hearts” you must crawl through procedurally generated dungeons, explore and collect heart gems which can be absorbed or used to make character stronger. We did not implement the continuous dungeon crawling trough levels due to time constraints, but it will be added soon enough.

You can check out the prototype here -> http://mightyfingers.com/dungeonOfHearts/ .
Source is publicly available here -> http://globalgamejam.org/2013/dungeon-hearts .

Dungeon of Hearts

We will continue to work on the game and we are planning to launch playable alfa version soon.

In these 48 hours the most time wasting part was the making of GUI. It always takes more time than we expect. CSS rendering bugs and jQuery problems did not help either. We have thought about this for a while and after the public release of our engine we plan to take care of this by making a proper UI editor in Mighty Engine, so you don’t have to waste your time thinking about how to create a good looking and functioning UI .

Currently we have field tested the engine with a few games and one of them is currently being played by tens of thousands of users in our local social network, we’ll tell more about this in our next blog post. Currently we are finishing up the documentation and tutorials for the private launch to our subscribers.