Hackable Games

Hackable Games?

A game is hackable if players, who don't necessarily identify as developers or coders, can change aspects of the game and share their changes with other players. The web is a great platform for hackable games because the technology is open and you can always view the source.

Thimble for Games

We built a webmaker tool called thimble, and then we modified it to support JavaScript so that we could use it to build hackable games.

There are two prototype games, Pong and Arkanoid; You can play or remix them on hackagame.org.

There are also two APIs that you can hack with, depending on what you want to focus on:

• The HTML API will tell you what you can do in HTML to our game templates by modifying element attributes
• The JavaScript API will tell you which functions you can call in "onbounce" handling. There's only a few functions right now, but you can already use them for quite a few game mechanics. Do you need more? Hack it!

Design Challenge

Build a hackable game!

• Use the live editor to hack a new game based on one of the prototype templates

  Start hacking at hackagame.org. You can publish and share your hacks too!

• Hack a new feature into the live game editor

  Get the source from the panel on the left. You'll need a local web server (ask us and we can help!)

• Build a completely new hackable prototype
• Make a one button game to play in a custom arcade cabinet
• (Something awesome that we didn't list here!)

Resources

• jster.net - A comprehensive collection of JavaScript libraries for physics, graphics, sound, animation
• opengameart.org - Game graphics and sound assets with permissive licenses
• freesound.org - Free sound assets

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