Mantra: An HTML5 2D game prototyping engine
Overview
Mantra is an HTML5 2D game prototyping engine written in CoffeeScript that I started writing a few years ago so that I could jam out games more easily at events like the Global Game Jam and at Boston Game Jams.
Tech
- Canvas-based graphics
- Written in CoffeeScript and compiled and concatenated into dist/mantra_all.js by Interleave.
- Audio support is (temporarily) provided by the Sound Manager 2 Javascript library
Getting started
Use the two demo games to get an idea of how Mantra works.
To run a demo game, include the dist/mantra_all.js file and then, on page load, call GameLauncher.launchInto(GAME, CANVAS) where GAME is one of the game classes and CANVAS is canvas DOM element. For example, GameLauncher.launchInto(EightByFive, document.getElementsByTagName('canvas')[0]) would load the "8by5" game into the first canvas DOM element on the page.
I have included two ready-to-go HTML file for this, demos/eight_by_five.html and demos/evil_aliens.html.
If you have Node installed, just install the "send" package ( npm install send ), run the "demoserver.js" server ( node demoserver.js ), and then go to /demos/eight_by_five.html and /demos/evil_aliens.html on that server to play the games. Their source code is in /mantra/games within this repo.
Attributions
"Evil Aliens" demo based on Seth Ladd's talk @ Google I/O 2011: "Super Browser 2 Turbo HD Remix: Introduction to HTML5 Game Development"