DOME - Design-Oriented Minimalist Engine

A comfortable framework for game development which melds SDL2 and the Wren scripting language, written in C.

For more information on how to use DOME and get started, read the docs here.

How to Use

Download

You can download production-ready binaries from our Releases page. This is the recommended method for distribution and easy development.

Install via Brew

Alternatively, if you have Homebrew installed (Mac OS X, Linux and WSL), you can install DOME using the following commands:

> brew tap domeengine/tap
> brew install dome

Build

Finally, if you want to build DOME yourself, to make modifications or other reasons, follow these instruction instead.

Ensure you have the shared SDL2 libraries installed on your system first, then to build, run:

> make

This will create an executable named ./dome (on Mac OS X and Linux), and ./dome-x32.exe or ./dome-x64.exe.

Run

Run ./dome [gamefile.wren] to run your game. If your initial file is called main.wren, just running ./dome will execute it. Replace dome with your built binary name as necessary.

Basics

Your game’s entry point must contain a Game variable which contains at least init(), update() and draw(_) methods.

import "input" for Keyboard
import "graphics" for Canvas, Color

class Main {
  construct new() {}

  init() {
    _x = 10
    _y = 10
    _w = 5
    _h = 5
  }

  update() {
    if (Keyboard.isKeyDown("left")) {
      _x = _x - 1
    }
    if (Keyboard.isKeyDown("right")) {
      _x = _x+ 1
    }
    if (Keyboard.isKeyDown("up")) {
      _y = _y - 1
    }
    if (Keyboard.isKeyDown("down")) {
      _y = _y + 1
    }
  }

  draw(alpha) {
    Canvas.cls()
    var color = Color.rgb(171, 82, 54)
    Canvas.rectfill(_x, _y, _w, _h, color)
  }
}

var Game = Main.new()

Modules

DOME provides the following features, and more:

• Graphics
  • Canvas
    • Rect
    • Point
    • Circle
    • Ellipses
    • Lines
    • Triangles
  • Color
  • ImageData (aka Bitmap)
    • Draw sprites loaded from files (png)
  • SpriteSheet support
• Input
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
  • Gamepads
• Filesystem
  • File reading and writing
• Audio (stereo and mono OGG, MP3, FLAC and WAV files)
• Collections (abstact types)
  • Set
  • Queue
  • Stack
  • Priority Queue
• Native Plugins (allowing access to all kinds of functionality!)

TODO

You can follow my progress on implementing DOME on my twitter.

• Graphics
  • Potential 3D rendering mode?
• IO
  • Asynchronous Operations
• Network Access
  • UDP
  • HTTP client (maybe)
• Security sandboxing (maybe)

Dependencies

DOME currently depends on a few libraries to achieve it’s functions.

• Wren (included in the project repo already)
• SDL2 (version 2.26.3. If you install this from source, you’ll want to build shared/dynamic libraries.)
• utf8.h
• stb_image
• stb_image_write
• stb_truetype
• stb_vorbis
• microtar
• optparse
• jo_gif
• tinydir
• ABC_fifo (A SPMC threadpool/task dispatching FIFO I wrote for this project)
• mkdirp
• whereami
• dr_mp3
• dr_flac

Apart from SDL2, all other dependancies are baked in. DOME aspires to be both minimalist and cross platform, so it depends on as few external components as possible.

Acknowledgements

• Bob Nystrom for creating Wren and inspiring me to make games, thanks to Game Programming Patterns
• Special thanks to lqdev for the fantastic logo!
• Glenn Fiedler for the most referenced resources on Game Loops, Physics and Networking in games
• Casey Muratori for creating Handmade Hero, an inspiration and educational resource that makes this project possible.
• Built-in font comes from here.
• Sean Barrett for multiple libraries
• rxi for microtar
• Neil Henning for utf8.h
• Chris Wellons for optparse and pdjson
• cxong for tinydir
• Jon Olick for jo_gif
• Stephen Mathieson for mkdirp
• Gregory Pakosz for whereami
• David Reid for dr_flac and dr_mp3

Example Game Resources

• Example game and graphics are derived from this fantastic PICO-8 tutorial.
• Aerith’s Piano Theme (res/AerisPiano.ogg) by Tanner Helland is available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license: Link
• Game Over Theme (res/music.wav) by Doppelganger is available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license: Link
• Font “Memory” is provided by Eeve Somepx, and is available on their patreon here under a common sense license.