Kenji | Puzzle Game Toolkit
A passion project to both test the limitations of React Native, and explore the possibilities of creating dynamic puzzle game, and visual novel-style applications using a cross-platform mobile framework.
Developed using React Native to provide cross-platform deployment opportunities. Extends React Native capabilities to provide a toolkit of components and utilities to create puzzle games and visual novels for mobile (think Professor Layton).
What is Kenji for?
Kenji is three things at once:
A thought experiment gone wrong!
A retro game throw-back.
A toolkit for the indie development community.
I am designing Kenji to better understand the complexities of React Native, as well as provide a way for the indie game dev community to use the framework to create interesting retro-style puzzle games and visual novels in the style of Professor Layton, RenPy, etc.
Born out of a love for such retro titles, I wanted to find a way to make developing such applications enjoyable for mobile developers.
How does KEnji work?
Kenji is built on top of React Native components, and provides additional utilities written in TypeScript, as well as state management using MobX.
The Toolkit exposes a Navigator, which is the core of the toolkit, and handles swapping screens dynamically. Next up is the screen, think of this as a “level” or “scene”. Finally, there is a range of prefab entities to be used for all sorts of drawables (backgrounds, characters, titles, UI, etc) as well as fragments, which can be used to group together entities into a “layer”.
Progress of Kenji
Kenji is a project in active development and will see changes take place over time and based on user feedback. Currently, Kenji is in it’s alpha stage.
The roadmap for the development is as follows (be sure to check back for updates):
Finalize core functionality (Navigators, Screens, Entities).
Add all 1.0 prefabs.
entity interaction utilities.
Pre-release feature testing.
1.0 release.
Integrate custom animation library.
Desktop build system.