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[godDLL]

TypeScript and Three.js, that's a good combo. I had a similar idea for a tool with a custom deferred rendering pipeline. All the luckies to your team, I want to see this project make it.

[Superb Joe]

i used to have a superpower (peeing in two directions at once) but it went away

[elisee]

Superpowers devlog — Update 3

Today is the big day. We're launching Superpowers early access for supporters in a few hours. SO EXCITED!

CROWDFUNDING WEBSITE

I spent well over a week building a complete website to prepare for the launch today. There's always so much stuff to do for user accounts: sign up, log in, email confirmation, account update, CSRF handling, input validation and backend. Add on top of that internationalization (the website is available in both English and French) and design work and that's a lot of work. Anyway, it's all done now!

Click to check out the website and subscribe to our newsletter!



We finally chose a logo! Meet Superpowers, the... hexapus? It's so cuuute



2D COLLISIONS, 3D PHYSICS

Bilou built a simple arcadePhysics2D plugin to handle collisions, check out his recent tweets to see how it works. We've also been working on a little 3D game demo with Pixel-boy, and Bilou exposed the Cannon.js physics engine as a plugin too!

Cross-platform rage! The full demo is playable over at our website


PASSWORD-PROTECTED SERVERS AND PERSISTENT CHAT

We didn't find the time to implement full-blown authentication and rights management for the launch so we decided to go with a simple server-wide password. Until you set up a password in the settings pane, your server will only listen for local connections so that you don't accidentally expose your projects to the world. When connecting to a server, you'll be asked to enter a username. Connected users are listed on the home tab and there's a persistent project chat too!

OS X AND LINUX BUILDS

Working with portable Web technologies is (almost always) awesome :D. Porting to Linux and Mac only took a few hours, most of which was spent figuring out how to package things nicely with icons and stuff.

Superpowers running on Ubuntu Linux and OS X, powered by nw.js



EARLY ACCESS STARTS TODAY! HELP US GO OPEN SOURCE

So, if you like what you've seen so far and would like to start playing with early builds of Superpowers, we're  launching our crowdfunding campaign today, in just a few hours! The end goal is to create a sustainable situation so that we can open source the whole thing and keep making it better with you. Support us on SparklinLabs.com We'll be live over at hitbox.tv/elisee so feel free to drop by and ask questions and stuff! Thank you so much for all the support and talk to you very soon.

[elisee]

TypeScript and Three.js, that's a good combo. I had a similar idea for a tool with a custom deferred rendering pipeline. All the luckies to your team, I want to see this project make it.

Thanks a lot!

i used to have a superpower (peeing in two directions at once) but it went away

Thanks... for sharing hahaha

[Tokinsom]

Why not have some "super power" stars for the logo? Not very original but it makes more sense than the hexapus (adorable as it is).

Anyway, 3 hours to launch! Hype!

[kamac]

Oh, your campaign's on. Figured I might put a note here for the people to see.

I dig your design a lot, by the way!

(The campaign is being run on https://sparklinlabs.com/ with patron, which means monthly subscriptions/donations, if you're interested)

[elisee]

Oh, your campaign's on. Figured I might put a note here for the people to see.

I dig your design a lot, by the way!

(The campaign is being run on https://sparklinlabs.com/ with patron, which means monthly subscriptions/donations, if you're interested)

Thanks so much for posting! Yes, the campaign has indeed started and the demo game is live!
We have a lot of work on completing the documentation, thanks for being patient! :D

[eigenbom]

Great to see the campaign launched! I'm a little surprised you guys didn't just go for Kickstarter, you could have got a lot of traffic from that. It's great that you're running your own brand of crowd-funding though and I wish you guys well! :D I'll be sure to share the link around

[Dr. LudoS]

Woaw, that's an outstanding project!

I was already impressed by CraftStudio, so I'm definitively following this project to see how it turns out!

Good luck with the funding campaign! :D

[FK in the Coffee]

Ridiculously impressed by the polish going into this.  As an aspiring graphic/web/ux designer, this is incredibly inspiring work, and the program looks really promising!

[JohnWizard]

Looks pretty awesome!  By the way, you should post about your engine on https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev it would get a lot of traction there. 

[elisee]

Just uploaded a short video demonstrating how some of Superpowers works:

Click here to watch
Superpowers early demo video

Looks pretty awesome!  By the way, you should post about your engine on https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev it would get a lot of traction there. 

Thanks! Just did!

Ridiculously impressed by the polish going into this.  As an aspiring graphic/web/ux designer, this is incredibly inspiring work, and the program looks really promising!

Thanks a lot

Woaw, that's an outstanding project!

I was already impressed by CraftStudio, so I'm definitively following this project to see how it turns out!

Good luck with the funding campaign! :D

Thank youuu!

Great to see the campaign launched! I'm a little surprised you guys didn't just go for Kickstarter, you could have got a lot of traffic from that. It's great that you're running your own brand of crowd-funding though and I wish you guys well! :D I'll be sure to share the link around

Kickstarter isn't available in France yet (though I heard it's coming soon). We could have gone to Indiegogo but we thought about the best way to make our work sustainable for the community and a stable source of income is where it's at.

[QuaziGNRLnose]

Construct 2 is pretty rad. Any word on whether Construct 3 is adding any 3D support?
...

Hi! I'm the developer of the Q3D plugin for construct 2. I don't think Scirra are planning to add 3D support (they've voiced it countless times). Nonetheless, since the runtime will be identical to c2, i'll probably be very quickly able to port the plugin over with an improved edit-time workflow if they give plugin developers the proper tools to control the editor like they can control the run-time. If they play their cards right I'll be able to actually make construct 3 an amazing visual scripting tool for 3D web game development. Q3D works really well in C2, and you can really get quality projects out, but the editor holds it back and i wish i could write my own for the plugin .

Anyway, not trying to derail the thread, this software looks great so far! I really dig how lightweight it looks.

[andoowhy]

I was going to ask why you guys decided to put a text editor in (instead of just using an external tool Sublime or Visual Studio) but then the real-time collab started happening and my jaw hit the floor.

Awesome job, I hope you guys reach your funding goals. I think you guys should set up a Patreon account / page too, if you haven't already.

[pixelpicosean]

Just find this cool project from HTML5 weekly. It's great that you make games with it yourselves, that makes it a serious thing

I have a question about the 2D support:

• Are you using Three.js for 2D rendering?
• About 2D support, does it have a Canvas2D fallback if WebGL is not supported?

[elisee]

Thanks for all the kind words y'all! The first Superpowers update is coming out in 4 hours, Superpowers 0.2. If you're supporting us, you'll find it in your account page over at https://sparklinlabs.com/account.

I'm about to start collecting the changelog, it's going to be HUUUGE. I'll be back with a devlog post soon, too!

Hi! I'm the developer of the Q3D plugin for construct 2. I don't think Scirra are planning to add 3D support (they've voiced it countless times). Nonetheless, since the runtime will be identical to c2, i'll probably be very quickly able to port the plugin over with an improved edit-time workflow if they give plugin developers the proper tools to control the editor like they can control the run-time. If they play their cards right I'll be able to actually make construct 3 an amazing visual scripting tool for 3D web game development. Q3D works really well in C2, and you can really get quality projects out, but the editor holds it back and i wish i could write my own for the plugin .

Anyway, not trying to derail the thread, this software looks great so far! I really dig how lightweight it looks.

No problem, thanks for sharing. Didn't know there even was a 3D plugin! If you're held back too much, come over to the dark side! We have superpowers, cookies and a plugin-based architecture. hehe

I was going to ask why you guys decided to put a text editor in (instead of just using an external tool Sublime or Visual Studio) but then the real-time collab started happening and my jaw hit the floor.

Awesome job, I hope you guys reach your funding goals. I think you guys should set up a Patreon account / page too, if you haven't already.

We would have gone with Patreon but we're based in France and the EU VAT rules have changed since 2015 and doing Patreon would be really complicated for us at the moment.

Just find this cool project from HTML5 weekly. It's great that you make games with it yourselves, that makes it a serious thing

I have a question about the 2D support:

• Are you using Three.js for 2D rendering?
• About 2D support, does it have a Canvas2D fallback if WebGL is not supported?

2D rendering in Superpowers is just a 3D scene with an orthographic camera. There's no canvas 2D fallback in our engine, WebGL support is very widespread nowadays and we don't think it's worth investing in the canvas 2D API. As mentioned earlier though, Superpowers as a collaborative platform could used to build a Canvas 2D engine and a set of 2D-only plugins!

[darkhog]

https://developers.google.com/blockly/

You might be interested in integrating above. Especially since CraftStudio offered similar feature.

[elisee]

Superpowers devlog — Update 4

10 days ago we launched Superpowers in early access. You guys have been awesome supporting and spreading the word. Thanks to your generosity, we're already at € 845 per month from over 100 supporters. Superpowers's future is bright!

SUPERPOWERS v0.2 (and v0.2.1)

We're going to try and release weekly updates. Friday night we released v0.2.0 (and v0.2.1 right away to fix a couple bugs that slipped in). I spent some time writing a couple scripts to automate most of the building and packaging process, seeing as we're going to be doing a lot of that :D.

You can check out the MEATY v0.2.0 changelog
and read on for some highlights with screenshots!

DOCUMENTATION

Superpowers now has a pretty good Getting Started guide that will take you through setting up your project, writing your first scripts, working with scenes and more.

To accompany the guide, we also released a first version of the built-in API browser. It lists all modules, classes and functions exposed by the plugins installed on your server. I plan to add some sort of JSDoc/TSDoc comments parser so that plugins can document each function, provide examples and more.

The API browser is available from within your Superpowers client.

LIVE ASSET UPDATES IN SCENES

The assets rendered in the scene editor are now updated live! For instance, if you or someone else makes a change to a 3D model in another tab of the same project, the changes will immediately be reflected in the scene you're looking at. This is something I wanted to have in CraftStudio for a long time but as with many things, the code base just couldn't accomodate it. While redesigning Superpowers, we took great care in making sure it would be possible and thanks to Bilou, it is now done!

ERROR REPORTING PANE

When hitting Ctrl+S to apply script changes, your whole game is automatically checked for syntax and type errors with TypeScript. Starting with v0.2, any error found will be reported right below your script.

No need to run your game to discover typos or other pesky mistakes.

CHAT NOTIFICATIONS

Thanks to the Web platform's support for desktop notifications, you'll be notified whenever a chat message is posted in a project you're connected to. Think it's annoying? There's a button to disable it in the top-right corner of the window.

SPRITE GENERATOR (PROOF OF CONCEPT)

Pixel-boy has been fiddling with a random character generator. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it hints at the kind of tools we might release in the future to make creating games easy for all!

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

Florent Poujol released a bunch of Superpowers plugins including a nifty text asset plugin that can be used to load JSON and other formats into your game! Ralmn created a plugin repository where you can find all of the community plugins currently available. He also contributed a few: a camera preview plugin and a canvas 2D-based text rendering plugin. It's incredible to see the community step up and start building add-ons even before we've had a chance to document anything! :D Oh and we set up Skype groups for the community. Come hang out and ask questions over at http://sparklinlabs.com/skype/en (or http://sparklinlabs.com/skype/fr if you're into French!)

INTERFACE DESIGN

As you might have noticed, Superpowers's user interface is fairly... bland, right now. I've been working on fixing that. I merged the window frame with the tab bar, reworked colors and borders and created custom icons for each asset type. Here's how it looks now:

Hopefully this will make in time for 0.3 at the end of the week, or failing that, 0.4.
I haven't reworked the editor at the center, just everything around it.

That's it again for this devlog update! Hope you enjoyed reading it. And remember, you can support us and get early access to Superpowers right now over at https://sparklinlabs.com/. Cheers!

[elisee]

https://developers.google.com/blockly/

You might be interested in integrating above. Especially since CraftStudio offered similar feature.

Yeah Blockly is a definitely possibility! I haven't looked at it closely but I remember I broke it when I tested it a while ago. But probably it was just a bug that can or has been be fixed. And hopefully it's themable too because wow, that's one ugly bastard haha

Anyway, we (as in Bilou and I) are not going to be looking at a visual scripting plugin anytime soon, we've got our hands full with so many other things. If the desire is widespread enough, I expect someone in the community will build a plugin for it

[darkhog]

First party support is always better than third party.