Codebot is a free and open source (MIT license) web-based IDE focused on game development.
NOTICE: if you would like to try Codebot, check out the free and online demo available at https://codebot.cc
Simply put Codebot is a code editing program equipped with built-in tools for gamedev, all running on the cloud. It aims to help you make your game, no matter where you are or the equipment you have (read full thoughts here).
Developing a game is much more than just coding, you have to tweak art, build levels, convert files, find assets/extensions, read docs about building and publishing, and so on. IDEs should help with those tasks, or do them automatically. Imagine you are working on a Ludum Dare/1GAM game and you need an 8-bit SFX. You click a button, a panel slides, you type in a few keywords, select what you want and done! You have the SFX ready for use. That's the idea behind Codebot.
- Full-featured code editor.
- Support for Javascript projects (Haxe coming soon!).
- Files panel (drag/rename/move files around).
- Built-in 8-bit SFXs panel.
- Built-in assets finder panel (currently works with a curated list of opengameart.org).
- View different file types (images, sounds, text).
- Projects manager.
- Support for plugins.
- Built using web technologies, ready to run on the cloud.
You need a webserver with PHP support, and MySQL to run Codebot.
Go to the DocumentRoot folder of your webserver, e.g. /var/www/ on Ubuntu or C:\wamp\www on Windows:
cd /var/www
Clone Codebot's repository (including submodules):
git clone --recursive https://github.com/Dovyski/Codebot.git codebot
From this point on, you can continue the installation and configuration using Codebot web-based installer. Just access http://localhost/codebot and follow the instructions, it will take less then 5 min:
Codebot has several files that are used for configuration. The one responsible for the back-end configuration is /plugins/ide-web/config.php. The best practice is to create a local configuration file named config.local.php, i.e. /plugins/ide-web/config.local.php, that overrides only the directives you want to change.
If you used Codebot web-based installer, you already have the /plugins/ide-web/config.local.php file created for you. You can edit the config.local.php file anytime to meet your needs, e.g. to adjust Oauth credentials, debug mode, etc.
By default, the directives CODEBOT_DEBUG_MODE and CODEBOT_DEV_MODE will be set to true, which makes Codebot run in development mode. When in such mode, local authentication without username or password is allowed.
WARNING: if CODEBOT_DEV_MODE directive is set to true in production, your server/users might be at risk!
After installing and configuring Codebot, visit http://localhost/codebot and start enjoying a cloud-based gamedev environment. If CODEBOT_DEV_MODE is set to true (default), you will have the option to login without providing a username or a password.
The development process is a little bit rough right now. It's basically me coding and changing things a lot, documenting things very superficially along the way. At some point, the APIs will stabilize and it will be a lot easier to join the party.
If you want to help now, you can take Codebot for a ride and send me your feedback, or suggest a feature, or send a "cool!"/"insane!" motivational message :). Just ping me at @as3gamegears or open an issue.
Codebot is licensed under the terms of the MIT Open Source license and is available for free.
See all changes in the CHANGELOG file.
Codebot is by no means a novel idea. Below are a few projects that are similar to Codebot, i.e. web-based IDE/code editor.