http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/26/connecting-to-your-creation/
I stumbled across this, and it looks like a fantastic way of making a game a week, or playing with an idea, or just having another tool. But I haven't been able to find anything out there that works like this.
Am I missing something obvious, or is this in need of exploration?
We really need advances in live-edited languages first, so that we can have the infrastructure for doing things like live-edit game development. It really isn't practical to try and build a live-edit toolkit on top of a language/library/engine structure that fundamentally only believes in compile-and-run.
I figured this was the case, but it seems like such a great way of working, I was hoping I missed it somewhere.
You may want to try and look at Frogatto. It's a GPL game and costs $10 but used to be free so you can probably find a free version for your OS (the game is very cross platform).
You can edit script (custom language called FFL) code, place/remove tiles (with autotiling support), change sprite sheets and selected sprites from it, see how game will run after the edit (like Bret Victor did, the character is shown in a blurred trial that shows progress over time - see videos) and even add and remove shaders and set their uniforms. All at runtime, with game still running or paused (you can control the time as well).
Here are a few videos:
I've been thinking about this quite a lot in the last few days. I think making your game as "live" as possible could really open up some possibilities.
It does.
I hinted at some of it here but the bottom line is that anything you can do to tighten the iteration loop is very, very powerful.
The good new is that I've been doing all this stuff in Java, so embedding a web server will be easy.
I guess I asked this question just a few weeks to early.
I didn't know it was a kickstarter years ago, but I can't wait to start playing with it...
Yeah, I was really upset when I searched for something that did this and didn't find anything. I think for an environment for making game prototypes to search for fun ideas this is the way.
