hello-eme-play

What it's about

On hello-eme.ch a small pixel figure walks across the page, punches paragraphs until they break and gets into a car. That bit of fun grew into an engine of its own: the website itself is the playing field, and everything that happens in the game lives in a single JSON. That way the game fits on any page, with plain HTML, any framework or any CMS.

Try it

On hello-eme.ch, press the game button next to the light/dark switch. For your own page one line is enough: download play.js from the releases page, put it next to your page and include it.

<script src="/play.js" data-config="{}" defer></script>

{} is already a complete game with all defaults. Everything else is merged over those defaults.

What the engine can do

• Two views: top-down and side-scroller, where the page's elements become platforms. Switch at any time through items, triggers or levels
• Figure, monsters, vehicles with stats like health, attack and speed, moves (punch, kick, bite) and behaviors (chase, wander, flee)
• Levels and goals: score, kills, survive for a while or defeat a boss
• Items, upgrades, a shop and triggers following the pattern “when X happens and Y holds, do Z”, plus sounds and a high score
• Your own pictures: pixel art is built in, your own PNG or SVG sprites with animations replace it
• Touch controls with a d-pad, round action buttons and a steering wheel and pedals for the car
• Safe: the JSON is always validated, wrong values are corrected and never crash the page

Screenshots

Edit it in the CMS

For Payload CMS there is a plugin. It turns the JSON schema into a form in the admin, in German or English, with presets, a picture picker and a tab for the raw JSON. That's how I adjust the game on hello-eme.ch without touching code.

Balance without a browser

Bots play a JSON headless and report win and death rates, scores and hints such as “nobody survives” or “too easy”.

Tech

TypeScript in an Nx monorepo with five packages: play (browser runtime), play-core (game logic without a DOM), play-schema (defaults, validation, migrations, JSON Schema), play-payload (the plugin) and play-sim (the bots). Installed straight from the GitHub releases, no npm account or token needed. Open source under the MIT license.

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