I’ve had real problems getting the arcade games running anywhere outside of my development environment, so I set today aside to remedy that and I can finally offer up what I think is a working version of Space Invaders for you to enjoy. You can find it wrapped up in a package called GARNET right here. GARNET is the name for the library I’ve made to run these arcade games off of YAML scripts. It runs as a little game engine that reads all the YAML files in its directory and works out what ones are playable. Then you choose one, and you’re away.
It isn’t hugely pretty right now, but eventually it’ll allow easy distribution of games made using GARNET, by just throwing out the YAML files and having the desktop application read them on their own. I toyed with an embeddable web version, but it was too much hassle, and this is a more flexible solution in any case.
Download it and have a look, play the Space Invaders example and poke around with the YAML if you like. Now that this is fixed (hopefully) I’m going to expand the library until Pong and Pacman are both playable – then I’ll distribute some guides on writing YAML descriptions of GARNETÂ games, as well as the library’s source itself.
p.s. An Android port of this system is also a probability. The group is looking at purchasing some tablets for research and development – if this happens, I’ll probably do a port.