SAGE - Sage a Game Engine

SAGE is a very simple JavaScript 2D game engine. It uses HTML5 canvas to render simple games with simple 2D physics. It supports many features including:

• Features
• Getting Started
  • GameObjects
  • Components
  • Levels
• Documentation
• Building yourself

Features

• Display
  • Sprite rendering
  • Sprite-based animation system
  • Camera
• Physics
  • Circle and AABB collisions
  • Forces, velocity and angular velocity
• Simple keyboard and mouse input management
• Simple sound management
• Basic Networking (see Sage_Server)

Getting Started

To create a game with the engine, you need:

• An HTML document with a canvas
• The SAGE game engine
• Some JavaScript that will use the engine

First, include the engine in the HTML file.

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/sage.min.js"></script>

To use the engine, you create a new Engine object and give it the HTML5 canvas it will use to render the game as a parameter. For example :

const init = function () {
	new Engine(document.getElementsByTagName("canvas")[0]);
};

GameObjects

The game is made with GameObjects. A GameObject is anything that is in the game (players, weapons, health bars, platforms, etc). A GameObject can be added to the game this way:

let go = engine.GameObjects.Instantiate(data);

The data argument is a JavaScript object containing the informations about this GameObject, more specificaly, about its Components (see Components below).

Components

Components are used to change the behaviour of a GameObject. In fact, only adding an empty GameObject to the game won't display or change anything. There are two ways to add a Component to a GameObject.

1. By passing a list of components to the Instantiate function:

let go = engine.GameObjects.Instantiate({
	component1: {
		property1 : value,
		property2 : {},
		property3 : []
	},
	component2 : {}
});

2. With the AddComponent function if the GameObject already exists:

go.AddComponent("component1", {
	"property1" : value,
	"property2" : {},
	"property3" : []
});

These are the default components that you can use that already exist in the engine:

Component	Description
Transform	Is used to give the position, the rotation and the scale of a GameObject
SpriteRenderer	Is used to display a sprite
Animation	Is used to display multiple sprites in an animation
MovingElement	Is used to apply any kind of physics to a GameObject
BoxCollider	Is used to apply a rectangle collider to a GameObject
CircleCollider	Is used to apply a circle collider to a GameObject
NetworkController	Is used to control an object over the network

Levels

You can create different levels in the JSON format and then load them into the engine. A level contains a list of GameObjects to create with their Components and some other optionnal informations about the level it is loading. Once the engine has been initialised with new Engine(canvas) you can use the engine.LoadLevel(level) function to load a level. The engine will then instantiate all the GameObjects.

Here is an example of a level:

{
	"name": "Lorem Ipsum",
	"gravity": { "x": 0, "y": 0 },
	"gameObjects": [
		{
			"Transform": {
				"position": { "x": 0, "y": 0 }
			},
			"SpriteRenderer": {
				"sprite": "img.png",
				"width": 1,
				"height": 1
			}
		},
		{
			"Transform": {
				"position": { "x": 0, "y": 0 }
			},
			"SpriteRenderer": {
				"sprite": "img2.png",
				"width": 2,
				"height": 2
			}
		}
	]
};

In this example, the level contains two GameObjects. Both of them have a Transform and a SpriteRenderer Component which will allow the game to display a sprite at their position. Apart from the gameObjects[] array, the level also has a name tag to give the level a name and a gravity tag to change the gravity vector in the game.

A complete game template can be found here.

Documentation

The engine's documentation is available here

Building yourself

To build the latest version of Sage, you will need NodeJS installed.

1. Clone or download this repository to your computer.
2. Download all the necessary dependencies from NPM by running npm install in the repository folder.
3. You can then build :
   • The minified version of the engine with npm run compile
   • The engine's documentation with npm run doc
   • The engine's Dash-compatible docset with npm run docset
4. Have fun!