candle's blog
flicksy 2
i've added support for previewing the dialogue in the same way you could in flicksy1, which is useful for laying out the dialogue exactly how you want it
by request i also added a button to double the dialogue resolution so that it matches how flicksy1 looks in double resolution mode--i don't personally like this much but it's there if you need it
i had vague plans to custom text box styling but i don't have any timeline to getting around to it. dialogue preview feels like a step towards it though
i've updated flicksy 2 with a button for switching scenes to double resolution i.e 320x200 instead of 160x200. this is the same resolution the text is rendered at
in theory i can support arbitrary resolutions, but i'm not sure that's actually desirable. neither bitsy or flickgame support this and i think it's nice for the fixed format to be part of the tool's identity
double resolution feels like an acceptable exception because it's simply bringing the scene size in line with the existing text rendering
the intention going on is to massively clean up the flicksy 2 code so that it can be more easily understood by anyone who wants to make customisations
in the course of those changes i've gotten around to separating the playback from the editor, so now when you export a game all the editor scripts, html, and css get stripped away to make the final game smaller
i've added the ability to use a drawing as a custom cursor. it's a small change but i think it will add a lot of opportunities to add personality to flicksy games
i've also added an experimental feature to publish a flicksy game directly to neocities from the editor. it opens a pop-up to a standalone webpage that you type your username and password into (if you trust me) and choose a destination to upload it to
i tried to make the uploader independent of flicksy, and as simple as possible, so that you can look at the javascript for yourself and see i don't save the passwords anywhere. however because the neocities api doesn't support requests from the browser, i have to proxy through a server that's more difficult to check--if you know anyone running neocities.. please ask them to support CORS in the API
flicksy is a small game making tool i made in march 2018. it was inspired by bitsy and flickgame and was one of the first web tools i released
i'm now releasing flicksy 2, a recreation of flicksy using my updated expertise and philosophy for creating web tools
it introduces some improvements:
- line, floodfill, and color picker tools for drawing
- resize drawings after creation
- new playtesting tools, including jumping to other scenes and jumping to editing the currently playtested scene
- simpler javascript-based scripting with easy commands for changing object drawings and switching scenes as dialogue progresses
- smaller editor filesize and much smaller exported project filesize
and loses some features for now:
- the scene size is fixed at 160px by 100px
- there's only one in-browser save
- does not include music bundling export function
a major motivation for flicksy 2 is to make flicksy as hackable as bitsy. i am working towards that end in a few ways:
- i have written it directly in plain javascript rather than being machine-converted from another language
- the scripting is now javascript based with the intention that a user could create their own custom commands to trigger from their objects
- i have switched the project data to use standard browser dataurls instead of a custom format (this also ends up being much smaller)
the javascript code isn't the easiest to read, but it's my intention to simplify it and provide more inline documentation now that the functionality of flicksy 2 is there
i'm am open to feedback on shortcomings and annoyances in the editor interface and featureset. email me or tweet at me!