Big LittleJS news! We have a game jam announcement, new logo, and some community contributions including an insane rendering speed boost.
Announcing LittleJS Game Jam
First of all I’d like to invite you all to participate in the first LittleJS game jam! It will be an exciting opportunity to unleash your creativity and develop games using the free and open source LittleJS game engine. There has already been great support with 56 people joined with 4 months before it starts. I can’t wait to see what you all make. 😅👍
Introducing The New Logo
We have been working on a new logo since last year and just recently unveiled it. The old logo was a simple pixel art train engine I made as an icon for the website. A good starting point, but felt a bit primitive and it was time for a redesign.
The creative process has involved gathering input from the community on discord and a forum post on GitHub. I even used AI to help prototype a few ideas. After many iterations and rounds of feedback, we have arrived at a result that I’m super happy with. One of the coolest things is that it is actually drawn using JavaScript!
This logo is already available in the engine as a optional splash screen that can appear while your LittleJS game is loading. You can see it play when opening the example game.
Engine Improvements
Finally, there have been a number of improvements to LittleJS over the past few months thanks to help from the community!
- Rendering Speed Boost: Cody Ebberson worked on switching over the rendering system to use instanced rendering which allows for a major boost. On my computer I can now draw an insane 400,000 fully dynamic sprites at 60fps, while before it topped out around 50,000. That’s an 8x speed boost! You can follow our discussion here.
- ZzFX Filter Parameter: Dmitry Iv. added low and high pass filters to the ZzFX sound synth, which I also pulled into the latest LittleJS update. This extra parameter really opens up the range of sounds that are possible. You can play with it live in the ZzFX sound designer.
- Engine Type Info Cleanup: E1e5en has been helping fix up many things, especially the type info which is much improved. A new file called jsconfig.json was added to the project to help preserve type correctness. The documentation has also been updated.
- Many other users have been helping with feature suggestion and bug reports. Join the discussion on discord and share your ideas!
Thanks for reading
That’s all I have for now. You can star LittleJS on GitHub to get the latest updates, we hope to reach 3k soon!
I’ll leave you with one of the AI generated images I made while iterating on the new logo that I thought was funny. Thankfully people in the forum steered me away from giving the logo a face. 🤣 All aboard the LittleJS express, full speed ahead! 🚂
