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Comment by elisee | Hacker News Reader

CraftStudio is my real-time multiplayer "game to make games". I built it out of my own frustration with existing game-making tools and a desire to let everyone (gamers, most importantly) make their own games. Minecraft was an obvious inspiration to its blocky, pixelarty nature.

Here's the full announcement for the Beta with an overview of the changes: http://sparklinlabs.com/2013/04/craftstudio-beta-is-released...

Among other things, I redesigned the whole interface, added a physics engine (BulletXNA) and build a Web player (using Three.js and Lua.js) to allow playing CraftStudio games right in in the browser: http://store.craftstud.io/games

If you have any questions, technical or otherwise, I'll gladly answer them.

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Great job, man. I highly recommend you allow people to subscribe to it on a monthly payment system. Or, unfortunately, you won't be making enough money to pay bills off of downloads alone.

Don't let anything stop you!

I'm trying to keep it affordable for everyone, hence the once-time payment. I plan to have a built-in store to allow sharing games & assets and when people sells their stuff on it, I'll take a cut (although people will still be able to sell their games / assets outside CraftStudio without paying me anything) and might provide server hosting and so on at a cost later too. Thanks for the advice!

This looks very cool. Were you also inspired by the Kodu Game Lab for Xbox 360? That game was probably one of the more enjoyable game making games I've played.

Nope, I only heard of it afterwards.

I assume that you're using C# given that the physics engine is BulletXNA. What process do you use to translate games to run in JavaScript?

I rewrote the whole runtime in CoffeeScript. I'm basically using the exact same C# data files, I simply wrote the equivalent of the .NET BinaryReader in JS (using the recent ArrayBufferView WebGL typed array thing) to read back my binary project & asset files. I then use Lua.js (https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js/) to convert the Lua scripts into JS at load time and mrdoob's Three.js (threejs.org) to render it all.

Very (pleasantly) surprised to see a full French localization. Would love to hear whether it was worth it, wondering if I should translate my startup materials. Anyhow, félicitations!

> Very (pleasantly) surprised to see a full French localization.

I looked around for translations, and couldn't find anything. What other languages are available?

Great to hear the author built this with translation/localization in mind! It's simply not optional if kids are in the target audience. Fortunately it also means that imperfect or incomplete translations are better than none! children don't mind the occasional spelling or style error.

Barrier to exploration is what it's all about. It's scary exploring a new user interface in a language you don't understand (great example is the stereotypical "japanese hi-tech toilet" scene in a sitcom). Even a few not-quite-right word-for-word translations builds confidence as to what a button or command _probably_ does, and also what it most probably will _not_ do (say, exit without saving :P).

CraftStudio itself has well-maintained French, German and English translations. There are stubs or partial translations for Spanish, Polish, Portugese, Russian and Dutch.

If anyone feels like helping out, you can fork the translation repository at http://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/craftstudio-i18n (and http://bitbucket.org/sparklinlabs/craftstud.io-i18n for the website).

I'm French myself so it wasn't much of a thing; I've asked the community to help with contributing new translations and I just received a Hebrew one for the website and the German is in the works.

Definitely worth it in my case, since as I have lots of young users who can't speak English.

Super, moi aussi. Still impressive - translating/maintaining our materials in French seems daunting even though I'm a native speaker. Perhaps it'll be more feasible with community involvement.

Can we make multiplayer games with craftstudio?

Not just yet but now that the beta is out, this will be my next big focus! I've been doing some technology tests already (see http://sparklinlabs.com/2013/04/craftstudio-beta-release-dat... and http://wars.sparklinlabs.com/)

Fast response!

Last question: How will this work if me and my friends want to sell our game? You might be asking why professionals are using a tool like craftstudio to push out a game.

My friends aren't programmers. I'd rather them trying to figure out craftstudio than teach them opengl/webgl/direct3d.

Lol.

Everything you build with CraftStudio is yours, entirely (as long as you're using only assets that you own the rights too, obviously) - See http://craftstud.io/terms for details. I wouldn't want to ruin a good platform by providing unfair terms.

If you have any interest in perhaps using JSIL to cross-compile the .NET components of your engine, send me an email. It seems like it could simplify the maintenance of your web player (by eliminating the need for some code duplication). You could potentially consider moving the editor into the browser too, but that's more work.

Anyway, this seems like a great tool. I like your emphasis on collaborative editing - too few tools consider team workflows; some aren't even compatible with revision control!

Thanks for the offer. I'd love to move the whole platform to the browser in the future, but I'll probably wait for WebRTC and WebComponents support to get better before I start looking seriously at it. If I find the time, I'll try to see how a JSIL port of the Web player compares to my handwritten approach, I might be surprised to see the result :) Thanks for the pointer!

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