Getting Started

If this is your first attempt at building a game using this game engine, there are a few items you will want to be familiar with before diving in.

Platypus Overview

The Platypus game framework allows rapid development of 2D tile based games such as platformers. Levels maps are edited using the free Tiled Map Editor and the framework contains plenty of functionality to start authoring levels out of the box, such as prebuilt entities for the player, bad guys, portals, menus and much more. Once you have the engine downloaded and working, check out the examples to see what is available.

To get the included example game up and running:

• Clone or download the Platypus source.
• Have a web server running on your local machine that can serve the Platypus files.
• Navigate to /game/template.html

You should see the simple included example level!

Making A Game

After you've edited the example level, you'll want to get started implementing more functionality, adding your own assets and testing your game. The next logical place to look for information is the Game Structure article. After you've read that, you can find examples of how to use all the different aspects of the framework in the Guides section, as well as documentation on the various framework components in the Reference section.

Example Game and Game Builds

The Platypus framework comes with a very simple example game to start a project from. There are more robust examples of the engine functionality at the game examples page. The default example game can be viewed at /game/template.html (you must use a simple web server on your local computer such as WAMP, MAMP, etc). Once you begin creating your own games, this page is a great place to test and debug your game prior to building. This game is entirely defined by the information included in the /game/ and /engine/ folders, so editing the example data is a quick and easy way to see how changing certain entities and components affect the game. Once you're ready to deploy, follow the build instructions to compress the game and assets.

Directory Structure

The Platypus source contains three directories, and a fourth directory will be added by the build tools on your first compilation:

• /builds/ (created at compilation)
• /engine/
• /game/
• /tools/

The /builds/ directory will contain the various game builds created by running the compilation scripts in /tools/. The default builds are /builds/debug/ for debugging and /builds/game/ for deployment. The /engine/ directory contains core game engine source code that does not normally need to be edited to make a game. The /game/ folder contains all of the code, assets, configurations and level maps necessary to implement a particular game. Finally, the /tools/ directory contains scripts that compile the game source, optimize images and many other things necessary to deployment and debugging of your game.