Turtle

Turtle is a fake game console.

prey

High Level goal

The high level goal is to make it easy to make games.

Secondary Goals

allow for games to be portable.
- you should be able to compile down to a binary
provides quick feedback
- can develop in browser to see immediate results
make it easy to share games
be a good tool for gamejams
code

Scripting

Game Carts are built with lua (turtle has a lua interpreter embedded in the engine).

There are also several built in functions provided.

Sprite Editor

I created a simple sprite editor (inspired by spritely). To access the sprite editor, press Tab while the web emulator is running.

Sprites will be encoded to a hex string that is stored in the lua script as a comment.

You can then render that sprite by calling the SPR function. e.g.

function RENDER()
    CLR()
    RECT(0, 0, SCREENW(), SCREENH(), 12)
    SPR(0, 64, 80)
    SPR(1, 73, 80)
    SPR(2, 82, 80)
    SPR(3, 91, 80)
end

--startSprites
--cddccddcddddddddddddd7ddddddddddddddddddcddddddcccddddcccccddccc
--c88cc88c88888888888887888888888888888888c888888ccc8888ccccc88ccc
--c22cc22c22222222222227222222222222222222c222222ccc2222ccccc22ccc
--ceecceeceeeeeeeeeeeee7eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeceeeeeeccceeeeccccceeccc
--ceecceeceeeeeeeeeeeee7eeeeeeeeee8888e888ceeeeeeccceeeeccccceeccc
--endSprites

demos

Future Plans

There are several things I can think to do to improve Turtle. However, I'd like to step back from it.

I'm currently exploring ways to use WASI as a host for an interpreter.

I'd like to build out some tools to help make audio.

I'd like to build this to a smaller binary. It would be interesting to be able to build out a game in some kind of simple game cart and then deploy it to firmware on a micro-controller. For something like this, I would likely need to change out the tech stack. Go can build to web assembly, but the filesize ends up being fairly large (around 6MB for something simple). I will likely have to use something like tinygo (which is basically go with an LLVM backend) or switch to a different language.

The dream is to be able to compile to a native binary, a static website, or an custom built (cheap) game console.

based on my current research, it seems reasonable to build a nice game console that would run these games for less than $20

With all that said, I'll likely stop working on the current implementation of Turtle while I research how to meet these goals.

dustinfirebaugh