Bitmap Font Editor

• Origin Story
• Features
• How to use
• Development
• Project structure
• NPM scripts

Origin story

For a long time I have been using Littera as a tool to create bitmap fonts. Unfortunately, it was a Flash-based tool and stopped working at December 2020. I have tried other existing editors but didn't like any of them. So I decided to create my own editor based on Phaser and Tweakpane, tools I'm very familiar with.

Features

• automatically loads all system fonts
• text effects as shadow, glow and stroke
• export to XML or JSON
• export to Texture Packer atlas

How to use

To start the editor run the following commands:

• npm run ts-compile
• npm run serve-dev

Development

To start developing run the following commands:

• npm run ts-compile
• npm run ts-typecheck
• npm run serve-dev

Application entry point is at src/startup/Startup.ts

Project structure

• dev
  Development build of the game

• scripts
  Cointains various helper scripts for NPM and Grunt tasks

• src
  Typescript source code

NPM scripts

• ts-compile
  cd scripts/build/ && node dev.js
  Compliles TS to JS using extremely fast bundler - esbuild

• ts-typecheck
  tsc --project ./tsconfig.json
  Runs typescript compiler in watch mode. As name suggests it does only typechecking without emiting any js files. On the project of this scale the full compilation (emit + typescheck) may take several seconds which is annoying. So we use combination of esbuild (emit) and typescript (typecheck) to tackles this issue.

• ts-typecheck-fast
  tsc --project ./tsconfig.fast.json
  The same as previous command, but it uses the assumeChangesOnlyAffectDirectDependencies flag. If you work on slow low-end machine and ts-typecheck command takes too much time you can you this command instead but be aware of the trade-off.

• serve-dev
  Serves the content of dev directory. We use the browser-sync package for all serving needs.

• serve-dev-https
  browser-sync start --config scripts/browser-sync/dev-https.js
  Serves the content of dev directory using https. You can use your custom SSL key and certificate, just add key.pem and cert.pem files to the scripts/browser-sync/ directory. More about this.

• serve-prod
  browser-sync start --config scripts/browser-sync/prod.js
  Serves the content of prod directory

• build
  grunt build
  Creates the production build of the game. Check Gruntfile for more details.

• deploy
  grunt
  Creates the production build of the game and uploads it to the server.

• texts-to-gsheet
  node scripts/texts/texts-to-gsheet.js
  Takes the content of dev/assets/texts.json and converts it to the Google Sheet. Check the Localization with Google Sheets section.

• gsheet-to-texts
  node scripts/texts/gsheet-to-texts.js && node run texts-to-ts
  Google Sheet to dev/assets/texts.json conversion. Check the Localization with Google Sheets section.

• config-to-ts
  node scripts/config-to-ts.js
  Create the typescript interface from dev/js/game.config.js, so we will get autocomplete and typechecking.

• texts-to-ts
  json-ts ./dev/assets/texts.json --prefix 0 --rootName ILanguages --namespace texts > src/texts/ITexts.d.ts
  Create the typescript interface from dev/assets/texts.json, so we will get autocomplete and typechecking.

• polyfills
  node scripts/create-polyfill-bundle.js
  Creates and minifies the polyfill bundle. Check create-polyfill-bundle.js for more details.

• phaser-custom
  cd scripts/phaser-custom/ && node build.js && cpy ./dist/ ../../dev/js/
  Creates an optimized Phaser custom build. It removes all Phaser features and classes which we don't use in the game which allow saving around 250Kb of JS code.

• compress-graphics
  grunt compress-graphics
  Creates AVIF, WebP and lossy PNG from the original lossless PNGs. Check Graphics compression section for more details.

• compress-graphics-clear
  grunt clean:compressed_graphics && grunt compress-graphics Removes all compressed graphics and re-run compression from scratch