Making games for Kate!

Warning

Kate is still in development, and this book is a work in progress.

Kate is a small fantasy console for small 2d games, particularly story-rich ones. It’s built to be privacy and security-conscious, and to empower players and developers. Anyone can build and distribute games for Kate free of charge, with no special devices required.

The Kate emulator runs on any device with a modern web-browser, providing virtual buttons for touch-based devices so everyone experiences your game the same way. When programming for Kate you write your game for a single platform, distribute it as a single file, and players can run the game in any device with a modern web browser.

This manual describes the basics of developing for Kate, as well as providing details on its approach to security and privacy.

• Getting started
  • Why make games for Kate?
  • What will you need?
  • Hello, World
• Programming model
  • Overview
  • Cartridges
  • Sandboxing and APIs
  • Capabilities
• Kate API
  • events — Event handling
  • cart_fs — Reading files
  • *_input — Reacting to player input
  • timer — Scheduling updates
  • capture — Screenshots and video recording
  • store — Saving state
  • browser — Navigating to URLs
• Web game support
  • Basics of porting
  • Bridges
• Packaging cartridges
  • Getting started
  • Configuration files