Merlin - an Excalibur meta framework

[mattjennings]

Hey all, I wanted to share a little project I've been working on called Merlin. It's a "meta framework" that provides an opinionated workflow for creating Excalibur games. (If you've ever used Next.js for React, it's the same idea).

Here are some of the features:

• Uses Vite as the bundler and dev server
• Scenes are automatically loaded and registered according to their filename
  • src/scenes/level1.ts automatically gets loaded as a scene called level1
• $res import alias that automatically parses assets as Excalibur resources and queues them up for loading

   import image from '$res/player.png' // -> returns an ImageSource
   
   // no need to add to a loader!
   const sprite = image.toSprite()

I've converted the official Sample Platformer project which you can check out here. If you want to try it out, run:

npx degit mattjennings/merlin/examples/sample-platformer sample-platformer
cd sample-platformer
npm install
npm run dev

and it should work!

Please don't use this for production - I'm still exploring what this framework could look like and things will change/break rapidly (I may not even finish it 😅).

Let me know if you have any thoughts!

[kamranayub]

That's awesome, I've always thought it would be cool to do some kind of "router" between scenes that could handle transitions (think Zelda style).

[mattjennings]

Agreed! That is definitely something I want to look in to.

[eonarheim]

@mattjennings This is so cool! I definitely want to try this out as soon as I can!

This is an excellent way to remove the friction around scenes and loading resources!

[mattjennings]

I'll keep this thread updated on any major milestones, but hopefully sooner than later I can have a decent docs page on starting a new project with it. For now though I'm whipping up examples to dogfood it myself, so you can always clone & check those out if you get impatient 😛