Hey! I'm part of the small team building Superpowers over the past 6 months. I've been working on collaborative game-making tools for several years and Superpowers is the result of a lot of that work. I'm very proud of the small core + plugins architecture we came up with and excited to open source (MIT) it all soon!
We evaluated various possibilities and even started building our own scripting language (because TS compiler APIs weren't ready back then) before going with TypeScript. Many reasons:
We want Superpowers to be as "Web native" as possible. TypeScript is just JavaScript + types, they're working to align with ES6 and maybe even merge with ES7+, they have a lot of mindshare, their compiler services are awesome (having intellisense-like in the editor is a big deal) and the whole compiler can be run in the browser, which means it'll work everywhere just like the Web we're building on.
I like the pitch and the objectives stated here. The monthly funding model is a good fit for this sort of thing where users will want ongoing maintenance and improvement for their middleware.
Demo doesn't work well in Firefox (latest, Developer Edition) on Win8.1 x64, though. Z-buffering looks totally busted and the framerate is bad.
Thanks! We thought long and hard about how to fund the whole thing, and open sourcing + ongoing funding ended up looking like the best solution indeed.
That's quite the weird rendering bug. Everything works fine here in Firefox stable (tested on both Windows 7 and 8.1). Probably a driver issue of some sort? We're really not doing anything fancy, just using the default basic mesh material of Three.js and simple meshes.
The real-time collaboration seems kind of cool but also makes me wonder how you handle history, permissions, etc. If I'm editing code and you're editing code and I hit 'RUN' I don't want your half finished code that doesn't compile to prevent me from running the game.
I'm curious why I'd choose this over say Unreal (free), Unity3D (free), Source 2 (free). ok, they aren't 100% free but they're effectively free until you make money.
They all have a track record of shipping games on multiple platforms (some more than others). Some already have huge communities. 2 of them export to HTML5 if that's what you want. They have large detail animation system, cutscene systems, visual programming system, shader editors, quality importers for tons of formats...
> The real-time collaboration seems kind of cool but also makes me wonder how you handle history, permissions, etc. If I'm editing code and you're editing code and I hit 'RUN' I don't want your half finished code that doesn't compile to prevent me from running the game.
Script changes are marked as drafted until you explicitely choose to apply them to the current build (Ctrl+S), so you won't break the build because you're in the middle of typing a line of code. There'll be a membership and rights system, right now there's only a server-wide password. Real-time script editing uses the same tech behind google docs and such (operational transform). There's no special history support right now, the server owner can version the projects in Mercurial / Git manually. Later on we'd like to have a project-wide revision system right in the UI.
> I'm curious why I'd choose this over say Unreal (free), Unity3D (free), Source 2 (free). ok, they aren't 100% free but they're effectively free until you make money.
Unity, UE4 (and probably Source 2) are multi-GB download and fairly heavyweight tools with sooo many options and drawers. Don't get me wrong, I love Unity (haven't spent much time with UE and Source 2 isn't out yet), but Superpowers is competing with Game Maker, Construct and the likes, not the big engines.
Great to see Superpowers making progress. I'm interested in your choice of Three.js. Did you consider other WebGL game engines? Like PlayCanvas[1] (where I'm a co-founder) which is also open-source[2] but more designed towards games than three?
Hi Dave! I didn't realize the PlayCanvas engine was standalone like Three.js, I somehow assumed it was linked with the online editing tools you built. Good news! Really impressed with your physically-based shading support by the way.
We went with Three.js because it's pretty versatile and does everything we need in the near future. Superpowers is built in 3 layers: the core (which handles projects, storage and networking), the system (which is basically Three.js + game instance/actors/components) and all the editor & asset plugins built upon the system. The system can be swapped out with something else, and a new set of plugins can be built on top of it, or the existing plugins adapted for a new engine, so the community will totally be able experiment with other engines including PlayCanvas!
We spent a lot of time designing the Superpowers platform so that this would be possible :). In fact, Superpowers could even be used to make movies or write novels collaboratively, with the appropriate system and set of plugins.
This sounds exactly like an idea that I've had before. What my friends and I called it was 'GameTube' which would be a platform for making and sharing games online. That was part of what motivated me to work on the Duck programming language, which would be a simplified language to develop in, along with some web IDE's for game making and common content that aspiring game developers could work with.
I think creating a platform for collaborative creation in games is a great idea and something that is as-of-yet untapped in online communities. The main limiting factor is creating tools and platforms that outperform what already exists and creating an ecosystem for users where they have support to work on ideas that connect.
Looks cool. My boy spends a lot of time building games in scratch and has tried a few different ways to do it collaboratively with his mates without much success. This could be a great next step if you're successful.
Hey, I saw craftstudio (your previous product before), and I fairly liked the way you could create models there. Is that the case with superpowers aswell, or are we limited to modelling using 3rd party tools?
Hey kamac! Right now we don't have a cubic model editor plugin but it's something I'd love to add back from CraftStudio (or to see the community contribute) because it's so easy to make things with, either for prototyping or just to make blocky games :D.
I've also been toying with the idea of making a "Superpowers Minecraft modding edition" when Minecraft 1.9 comes out with an actual 3D model + skeletal animation format (everything has been hardcoded until now), so that could go hand-in-hand.
EDIT: Missed your question about shaders. We do plan to have a material editor and postprocessing shaders!
I already saw you on TIGSoucre and thought Superpowers looks pretty awesome. I was wondering if deployment to PC/Mobile is already working and what the performance on mobile can be expected.
You can load up your games in a recent mobile browser or package them into APKs with the Intel XDK (we didn't have a chance to test iOS export yet since we don't have an iDevice but it should work). Performance-wise, I don't have hard numbers or anything. This is the Web, you won't get as much perf out of it as a native app, but the games we've built so far run great.
You don't need funding to make an open source solution to game development.
I think you are confusing open source with free as in beer. A lot of open source projects are funded by companies, being open source doesn't exclude being paid to develop the software.
Your post is very disrespectful and dismissive and I'd really rather not dignify it with an answer but it's at the top right now (because it's the most recent?) so I feel like I have to. I'll take this as an opportunity to share useful links :).
This is CraftStudio, Superpowers' cubic ancestor I built. It's been bought and used by thousands of people: http://craftstud.io/
We've been building a community and doing weekly livestreams in French (cause that's where we're from) for several months.
Superpowers is an extremely modular and extensible, real-time collaborative 2D+3D game maker built with Web technologies. It's the lightweight HTML5 "Unity" for indie developers who want more control, flexibility, native Web tools and the abillity to work online with their team.
We're looking for financial support from the people who enjoy what we do and obviously, it's entirely OK for anyone to decide it's not for them :).
I wish for you that you'll find a better, healthier pastime than handwavingly mocking other people's hard work online.
If you look at the presented site, you can see there is already a demo showcasing the technology. Furthermore, if you read their blog, you can see a long list of games already made with Superpowers. On top of that, it seems like Superpowers does nothing new - it simply brings together already proven technologies with a long track record for success. Consult the xkcd chart at http://xkcd.com/1497/ and you can see that's a very good predictor for success.
slams desk, points finger
Mister Wright, you are obviously not fit to be a prosecutor and should stick to being a defence attorney!
I'll be happy to answer any questions, obviously.