NICO Game Framework

NICO is a simple game framework for the Nim programming language inspired by the PICO-8 API and built on top of SDL2 or the web.

What it does:

• Paletted Bitmap Graphics (you can load a custom palette up to 256 colors)
• Fixed or flexible custom display resolution with pixel scaling
• Sprite drawing, load png spritesheets, specify tile size per sheet (can load multiple and switch between them)
• Tilemap drawing, import json from Tiled
• Drawing primitives: pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, triangles
• Input: Keyboard, Gamepad, Mouse, Touch
• Sfx playback: load and play ogg vorbis files, configurable number of mixer channels.
• Built in chip synth
• Music playback: stream ogg vorbis files.
• Custom audio callback for generating your own sounds via code.
• Text drawing: load and draw fonts from png, supports variable width fonts.
• Export animated gifs

Installation

• You will need to have the Nim compiler installed
• Run nimble install nico
• Run nicoboot <projectname> to create a new directory with an example base ready to start working with.
• You can watch a quick tutorial here
• Make sure you have the required dependency: SDL2 for native builds, no dependencies for web builds.
• From your project directory run nimble runr to build and run the example as a native build.
• From your project directory run nimble web to build for web.

Learning

• API Documentation
• Examples

Why should you use NICO?

• It's fun and easy to use
• Learn Nim the fun way! It's a great new statically typed programming language that compiles to C.
• You can build for Web, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and potentially other platforms.

Future work:

• API Documentation
• More examples
• Tests
• Utility modules for common higher level tasks
• Browser to browser networking using WebRTC
• Immediate mode GUI
• 3D Utils and Rasterizer

Games made using NICO:

• Vektor 2089
• Smalltrek
• Moving in
• Cute Cats Daily
• Super Netwalk Deluxe