pico-go-electron

pico-go-electron

pigo-go is a standalone (offline) gamedev tool using Go. It is for developing simple games / demos like the pico8 console but instead of coding in Lua you use Go.

Installation

To get started follow the installation instructions here.

Getting started

Once you have built and run pico-go you'll be presented with a fairly empty code editor window.

Select New from the file menu or press CMD+N and the editor will be filled with a very simple program file.

Click run and the code will be compiled and the window will change to an awe-inspiring game window.

What actually happens

When you hit run the Go code this is what happens:

• the code is copied from the editor and sent to the backend in a temporary folder
• the demo project is a simple ebiten based demo
• one of the coolest features of ebiten is that it can compile to javascript
• GopherJS is used to compile the Go code into Javascript
• if there are any compilation errors these will be highlighted in the code editor against the corresponding source lines
• if there are no errors the resulting javascript file is copied to a location that keeps the Electron app happy (this differs for Windows & OSX grrrr...)
• the Electron app is reloaded and displays the game iFrame
• there is a little javascript jiggery pokery on the page to hijack adding event listeners
• don't worry about this bit, it's just so we can use our own canvas resizing code instead of the resize code generated by ebiten
• All being well you have a blue screen (not of death) showing a FPS framecounter and you can happily resize the window to your hearts content
• Now the fun begins and you start coding something for real

Next steps

Head on over to the development guide and get started writing your own games and demos.

developer guide

Or if your are looking for inspiration check out the examples

Benchmarks

There are a few benchmarks in here which have helped me pinpoint (and hopefully improve) cpu or memory intensive code. If you'd like to run them:

go test -benchmem -run=^$ github.com/telecoda/pico-go-electron/console -bench ^Benchmark

History

Find a little about the background of this project here

Standing on the shoulders of giants

This project has been made possible by a number of awesome open source projects.

ace.js

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace

Ace is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript.

Ebiten

https://hajimehoshi.github.io/ebiten/

A dead simple 2D game library in Go

Electron

https://electronjs.org/

Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS

hugo

https://gohugo.io/

Static site generator. Transforms markdown files into the embedded docs inside pico-go

hugo theme docDock

https://themes.gohugo.io/docdock/

go-astilecton

https://github.com/asticode/go-astilectron

Build cross platform GUI apps with GO and HTML/JS/CSS (powered by Electron)

GopherJS

https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs

GopherJS compiles Go code (golang.org) to pure JavaScript code.