dart-07-beetpx

A scrolling shooter, built with BeetPx. As the Dart-07 you fight on Emerald Islands, Outpost in Space, and in the interstellar Phoslar Mine

Development

In separate consoles, run:

npm run typecheck:watch

npm run syncAssets:watch

npm start

Typecheck

If you want to check if your TypeScript types are correct, run either npm run typecheck or npm run typecheck:watch (the latter runs continuously, performing the check on every file change).

Assets sync

There are two directories for assets:

• assets/ – here you can put anything, e.g. .aseprite files in which you edit your sprites or .ldtk files which you use to work on your levels
• public/ – whatever goes there, is added to the distributed game bundle. You should put here the final assets, in the format they are consumed by the game.

Because of that, there are two scripts: npm run syncAssets and npm run syncAssets:watch (the latter runs continuously, performing the sync on every change to asset files from assets/ observed by scripts/syncAssets.js).

Only some asset types are synced the script right now:

• assets/*.aseprite files listed inside scripts/syncAssets.js are exported to PNG in public/ with use of a hardcoded path to Aseprite executable
• assets/wav/*.wav are converted to FLAC in public/ with use of a ffmpeg executable
• assets/*.ldtk file listed inside scripts/syncAssets.js is copied and trimmed down to JSON in public/
• assets/*.aseprite files are NOT exported to WAV, since of the PICO-8 error in headless export in form of /Applications/PICO-8.app/Contents/MacOS/pico8 assets/sounds_main.p8 -root_path public. Moreover, that command makes the custom PICO-8 ROOT dir location reset to its defaults (which is an issue, if you use custom location for your regular PICO-8 work).

Run game

npm start runs the game in a watch mode.

Things you should be aware of:

• whenever any of source code files change, the game reloads
• whenever any of public/ asset files change, the game reloads
• type checking is NOT performed here

In other words:

• run npm run typecheck:watch in parallel for a type checking
• if you run npm run syncAssets:watch, then saving changes in asset files in assets/ will make the game reload

Game cover

To create a game cover:

• go to ScreenTitle
• change _gameCoverMode to true
• run the game