Reminds me a little bit of PICO-8 conceptually. At first glance I thought it was just a set of premade assets more than an actual game engine, but looking at the API more closely it actually does seem to resemble quite a bit the set of primitives that the PICO-8 console provides you, although without the pretty in-console IDE.
True! It has some similarities with PICO-8. Both are based on the simple, imperative programming languages of the past. QX82 is far less ambitious than PICO-8: it's just a library, not a full product + ecosystem. I didn't put in the niceties of an IDE and sprite editor and such, but it's also free and open-source and can be used anywhere and can be extended or taken apart as much as needed, as it's all just Javascript. It's a more "open" approach, let's say. It was also not made by a company: it was made by me, a random guy on the internet, who enjoys retro games :-D
Thank you for this wonderful and accessible library. So Graphically, the creative space appears to be limited to 256 individual custom characters in the sprite sheet and only one sprite sheet at a time. Spent some of the week considering xterm.js to create a game but after reviewing the api this looks to be a better fit for my dreams. Would really like to use this library to create an experience similar to “caves of qud”. Do you believe that is reasonable?
It has the same color palette as ZX Spectrum. Even the color codes are the same, and I remember them by heart. 1 - blue, 2 - red, 3 - magenta, 4 - green, 5 - cyan, ... [0]
Ha! You noticed it! :-D
I memorized it as 1=blue, 2=red, 4=green and then you add the numbers to make the combinations. So magenta is red+blue so it's 1+2 = 3 and cyan is blue+green with is 1+4 = 5.
This project has an interesting trait - despite the simplicity of source code, the resulting apps have a decent quality, even by today's standards. Imagine what would have been possible if we had such tools in 1980s.
That can be tweaked. Well, technically everything can be tweaked as it's open-source, but what I mean is that can be _easily_ tweaked, just by changing the parameters NOISE_SPEED and NOISE_INTENSITY in https://github.com/btco/qx82/blob/main/qx82/config.js.
Readit News
[0] https://btco.github.io/qx82/demo/example-colors.html
I've been on both the ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarters, and I'm loving it.
At one point I had an A4 print of the iconic "prompt" screen from the same model:
https://i.imgur.com/zfIIHQQ.jpg
That font, and that line, does make me very very nostalgic.