The "Eight-Bit Universal Role Playing" Engine is a feverishly retro-inspired RPG system, optimized for simple, single-handed mobile play. It is written in CoffeeScript (which compiles to JavaScript), so that it can be run on any platform that supports HTML5. This includes iOS and Android, as well as compliant desktop browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Some of the build tools are written in Java, so this is required to build the game from source.
Included is a playable and fun demo game. Go here to play it: http://pents90.github.io/eburp
This engine was written to make Gurk III, an RPG for Android and iOS.
The goal of this engine is to use a very simple push-button approach to play, as opposed to complex gestures and menus. The result is not the most ideal interface, but it is very easy to develop for, and players can learn it and become quite fast and satisfied with it. The game itself is also simple, but has enough complexity to support an interesting story and subtle combat strategy.
Even though the name "Gurk" is all over the source and the demo game. Please don't call your game "Gurk", that's our little brand! Also, you can use anything that is in this open-source project, but please don't pirate any graphics or music from the Gurk series that is not included here. That's all, enjoy!
Have a look at the file 'game/gurkDemo.js'. This is a self-documented JavaScript file that shows you how to customize the game data. You can also use the map editor by running the Java class gurk.MapEditor.
To build the demo game for web, there is a single script you can run: ./build-demo.sh
. That script can be modified to build for other platforms, build different games, etc. Otherwise, these are the steps to building this bad boy:
tools
directory to a path called out/production/jurk
. Alternatively (and ideally) use IntelliJ Idea Community Edition to build the tools, as the included Idea project is already set up to do this.game/gurkDemo.js
for the demo game) and the platform target, which is either web
, android
or ios
../build.sh web
./build.sh android/assets
./build.sh ios/Gurk/Gurk
index.html
in a web browser. Note that if you try load it as a file:
URL instead of hosting it via HTTP, Chrome will complain about security and the game won't run (on platforms with Python installed type python -m SimpleHTTPServer
in the directory containing index.html
for a simple webserver). For Android, build and install the included Android project in the 'android' folder. For iOS, build and install the Xcode project in the 'ios' folder.The engine consists of the following CoffeeScript files:
There will be more to docs to come!