Moonshot

Moonshot is a game launcher front end designed for the Lexitron arcade machine built by Run Jump Dev. Pick and launch games using a joystick.

Currently in prototype state.

Minimum Viable Product

Diagnostic screen with button check for all inputs
Joystick-navigable list of games with names and images
Game launch capability

Why Node-Webkit?

Easiest path for UI work, familiar for graphic designers
Supports everything we need: video, audio, game controllers, process management

Future Work

Houston, the slim watchdog process that can relaunch Moonshot if it fails
Graphic design!
Attract mode (30s inactivity => slides/videos)
Audio feedback during startup/navigation/launch
Live tweets #lexitron #gamename

See issues.

Build Instructions

Download node-webkit for your platform.
Unzip node-webkit into the project root (where the source directory lives).
To test the launcher, switch to the source directory and run node-webkit.

Linux: 
$ cd source
$ ../nw .

Windows:
> cd source
> ..\nw .

OS X:
$ cd source
$ ../node-webkit.app/Contents/MacOS/node-webkit .

To build the launcher app on Windows/Linux, zip the source directory and concatenate it with the node-webkit executable.

$ cd source
$ zip -r ../moonshot.nw *
$ cd ..
$ cat nw moonshot.nw > moonshot
$ chmod u+x moonshot

> cd source
> pkzip -r ..\moonshot.nw *.*
> cd ..
> copy /b nw.exe+moonshot.nw moonshot.exe

Or, for OS X, copy the files to node-webkit.app/Contents/Resources/app.nw

$ cd source
$ cp -R ./ ../node-webkit.app/Contents/Resources/app.nw

Adding games

Games can be added by including the following files:

- game_name // Game launch script
- main_image_file // Main image to display in Moonshot
- game_name.lex // JSON formatted game data

Each .lex file should contain at least the following structure:

{
  "name" : "Game Name",
  "images" : {
    "main" : "main_image_file",
    "screenshots" : {}
  }
  "author" : "Arthur Author",
  "website" : "example.com/gamename",
  "twitter" : "gamename",
  "video" : "video_file"
}

Some properties are not used in the present build, but will be in the near future.