NICO Game Framework

NICO is a simple game framework for the Nim programming language inspired by the PICO-8 API and built on top of SDL2.

What it does:

• 16 Color Bitmap Graphics (you can load a custom palette)
• Fixed or flexible custom display resolution with pixel scaling
• Sprite drawing, load png spritesheets (can load multiple and switch between them)
• Tilemap drawing, import json from Tiled
• Drawing primitives: pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, triangles
• Input: Keyboard, Gamepad, Mouse
• Sfx playback: load and play oggs, configurable number of mixer channels.
• Music playback: load and play one streaming ogg at a time
• Text drawing: load and draw fonts from png, supports variable width fonts.
• Export animated gifs

Installation

• You will need to have the Nim compiler installed, as well as a working C compiler
• Run nimble install nico
• You can now import nico in your project, see the examples.

Why should you use NICO?

• It's fun and easy to use
• Learn Nim the fun way! It's a great new statically typed programming language that compiles to C.
• You can build for Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and potentially other platforms.
• Should I use NICO instead of PICO-8?
• Unlikely, if you're trying to decide between them, go with PICO-8. If you've been using PICO-8 and making games with it and want to rewrite them in a new language or extend them in ways that PICO-8 can't, maybe consider NICO, although there are other options too.

Future work:

• API Documentation
• Fully configurable inputs
• More examples
• Tests
• Replace SDL2_mixer with a built in mixer with support for crossfading
• Built-in chip synthesiser / integrate NimSynth
• Editing tools
• Utility modules for common higher level tasks

Games made using NICO:

• Vektor 2089
• Smalltrek
• Moving in