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Comment by amilios | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

I've updated QX82 to support more than one font, which you can load at runtime, so now there is no limit to how many different characters you can have. You could have a different character set for each biome of your game, for example!

Since sprites are the same thing as fonts, this also means you can have custom fonts and switch fonts as needed.

It should work for creating something like Caves of Qud! I'd love to play something like that! Sign me up for the beta when you have it :-)

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