Releases · Bennethon/benne

BENNE (Bennethon Engine for Nifty Narrative Experiences) is an engine and VS Code editor for making point-and-click adventure games in TypeScript. This is its first public release.

You build rooms, characters, inventory, dialogs and interfaces in the BENNE Editor, write the game's logic in BenneScript, and ship the result to the web or the desktop. BENNE takes its lead from Adventure Game Studio and the classic LucasArts and Sierra adventures.

What's in it

An editor that lives in VS Code. The BENNE tree lays out your whole game. Live previews of rooms, characters, GUIs and inventory use the game's own renderer, and you edit walkable areas, hotspots, regions and colliders as polygons right in the preview. An Inspector shows the properties of whatever you select, and BENNE Play runs the whole game from any room without leaving the editor.
BenneScript. Game logic is TypeScript whose lines run in the order you write them, with no await. Every room, prop, item, dialog option and sound gets a typed, autocompleted name, so a typo is a red squiggle, not a silent bug. Dialogue reads like a screenplay:
```
door.onUseItem(items.key, () => {
  walkToClicked()
  Hank: `Let's see if this fits.`
  sfx.doorOpen.play()
  door.animation = 'Door-open'
  Hank: `It's open!`
  flags.unlockedDoor = true
})
```
Any verbs you like. A nine-verb SCUMM bar, a two-click scheme or anything in between is just a list in game-config.json.
Pixel-perfect by design. Aseprite sprite sheets, bitmap fonts and low internal resolutions, scaled crisply.
The rest of an adventure game: dialog trees, inventory, cutscenes the player can skip, region-based scaling and tinting, saving and loading, music, sound effects, voiced dialogue and video.
Puzzle dependency charts, drawn and edited inside the editor.
Ship it anywhere. npm run build:itch makes an itch.io browser build, and npm run build:windows makes a portable Windows desktop build.

Getting started

You need VS Code 1.106 or newer and Node.js (a current LTS). Aseprite is recommended for art.

Download benne-editor-0.1.0.vsix from this release's assets and install it:
```
code --install-extension benne-editor-0.1.0.vsix
```
Run BENNE: Create New Game from the Command Palette and pick a template:
- 9-verb: a LucasArts-style verb bar.
- 2-click: walk and interact with one button, look with the other.
- Blank: one empty room, for when you know what you're doing.
Open the new folder. The BENNE sidebar is your home base, and npm run dev plays the game in the browser.

The 9-verb and 2-click templates are small, complete games with rooms, characters, items, a dialog and menus, written to be read and taken apart.

Documentation

Coming from a 0.0.x preview?

The old register*Script / B. scripting API is gone, so after BENNE: Update Engine, scripts written for it must be rewritten in BenneScript. Commit your game first. Update Engine also deletes engine files the new engine no longer ships, including your game's src/game/boot/ folder, whose loaders moved into the engine. Nothing else under src/game/ is touched. See Updating BENNE.

BENNE is a personal project, released under the MIT License.

Full changelog: v0.0.11...v0.1.0

Assets 3

v0.0.11