Game developer guides

Guides for people who make a game, a campaign, a map or a unit, and want coilbox to carry it to players. Apart from Translate coilbox and Write on-screen text, these are not guides to working on coilbox itself.

Most of the tools here are hidden until you turn on Advanced mode in Settings > General.

Ship coilbox with your game

• Package coilbox with your game. Lay out one zip per operating system with the engine, the game and maps inside, so a player unzips it and plays.
• Distribution profiles. The profile.json file that rebrands and narrows coilbox for your game without rebuilding it. Every field is listed, with examples.
• Branding catalog. Give your game its art, links and names for every coilbox user, including those who did not get a copy you packaged.
• Map packs. Offer a named list of maps as one download.

Campaigns and missions

• Campaigns. Put skirmish missions in order, with briefings, media and unit restrictions, then export or bundle them.
• Scenarios. Author what happens inside the game: where units start, triggers, objectives and dialogue.
• Mission runtime. What a game adds to its archive so it can play scenarios, and how the runtime is tested.
• Make a tutorial campaign. Go from writing lessons to a new player being offered the first one on the home page.

Conquest and Warpath

• Set up conquest for your game. Supply system names, factions and AI rankings, or bundle a galaxy.
• Hand-made maps. Paint provinces in an image editor, describe them in map.json, and ship the map for Conquest and Warpath.

Maps

• Compile and decompile maps. Build a map for the engine from your images with Mapping tools, take an existing map apart, and check it in a 3D preview.

Units

• Unit builder. Assemble a unit from textured parts, animate it from a preset and write it into a game.
• What the engine reloads in a running game. Which parts of a unit the engine can swap while a game runs, how, and what a restart costs.
• Unit tweaks. Change a game's units and weapons in a project, compare them in a table, test the result and package it as a game of its own or as tweak slot lines for a lobby.
• Convert and compile unit scripts. Turn a BOS script into a Lua unit script, compile BOS to COB, and read a COB file back as source.

Replays

• Replay rewind for your game. Write an adapter that switches off what fights a recording, bundle it in your archive, and read what the player logs.

Old games

• Compatibility mode fixes. What the generated game does to an old game, why a fix never changes once it ships, and how to add one.

Tools

• Browse archives and run Lua. Look inside any game or map archive, save a file out of it, and run Lua with the archive loaded.

Words on screen

• Translate coilbox. Where each language's catalog is, how to edit and check it, how to add a language, and which words stay in English.
• Write on-screen text. The rules for the words coilbox shows, starting with which of its two readers a sentence is for.

The reference section has the route list a profile points at and the file formats these tools read and write.