Hello fellow itchies and welcome tothe Superpowers Mega Thread! If you're like me and have never megathreaded before, Amos shared somegreat 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.
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 editingMurder at the Residence Gudul
We've built theSuperpowers 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 aSuperpowers 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.
Superpowers is open source. You can download it for free onsuperpowers-html5.com.
You can support us witha donation on itch.io or bysupporting us on Patreon.
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!
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 toreturn it...oops. Long story short, I was hooked and I've been game-programming ever since.
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 namedCraftStudio. 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.
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 howBilou andPixel-boy ended up moving in from the other side of the country and how we got started on Superpowers. Crazy.
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 buildHunt 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!
(Just spamming the thread some to let everyone know that games exported from superpowers play very nicely withas-of-yet-unreleased secret itch.io stuff, in case you were wondering)
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!
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!
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 makedecent 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:
What I consider "purple" is probably your "magenta"... or something like that :D
I've been using Superpowers sinceJune 6th (seems like just yesterday :O) and it's improved a lot since then. I've only re-releasedone 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 theirTrello board for a while now, and I know they've been working really hard to make Superpowers great :D
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 playablehere'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 tocomplain about point out bugs as I find them in the editor.
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 ofterrible 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.
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!
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)
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?
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.
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 :)
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!
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?
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 friendsLes 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.
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 findthe website's source project on GitHub as well as the exported versionin the GitHub Pages branch. The system itself will be released alongside Superpowers in the coming weeks!
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?
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.
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
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?
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
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.
Hi! Thanks for all the warm messages. You folks are awesomely supportive!
Pixel-boy, Bilou and I took part in Ludum Dare with help from our friends Alexis and Romain, using theSuperpowers Game engine.
The result isSnow World, a 2-button tactical RPG, for 1-2 players!
Several other Superpowers games were made for Ludum Dare. I've started putting togethera collection of Superpowers games on itch.io, but there are more hosted elsewhere, too. Feel free to post your own in this thread!
We've created the future open sourcerepositories on GitHubfor 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'veposted 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!!
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 builtMarkSlide, 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 ^_^
