Pretty Chitty

Pretty Chitty is a pretty & chitty board game platform. It's a typescript framework that makes it quick and easy to build high quality async or realtime 3d strategy games.

Overview

Pretty Chitty provides a comprehensive game engine that combines:

• 3D Rendering: ThreeJS-based 3D visualization of game pieces (chits) with customizable lighting, cameras, and animations
• 2D Canvas System: React-based canvas rendering for textures
• Game State Management: Turn-based game logic with player interaction and state management
• UI Components: UI Playground with hot reloading makes UI changes a breeze
• Real-time Multiplayer: Client-server architecture with connection management and state synchronization

Live Demos

Check out these example games built with Pretty Chitty:

• Demo Game 1 - Description
• Demo Game 2 - Description

Source code for demos:

• Demo 1 Repository
• Demo 2 Repository

Documentation

Full API documentation is available at: https://pretty-chitty.github.io/pretty-chitty/

Or view locally after building:

yarn docs
open docs/index.html

Core Concepts

Chits

Chits are the fundamental game pieces in Pretty Chitty. Everything is a chit - cards, dice, tokens, players, even the game board itself. A Chit is a normal typescript class and can have any basic serializable properties on it (including references to other chits). The game state is effectively a tree, where every Chit (except the "root" chit) has a parent, a parentOutlet (i.e. how is this chit related to its parent), and possibly a parentOutletIndex (i.e. this is the third token in a stack on a card).

Key chit types:

• Chit: Base class for all game pieces
• RootChit: The game board/table that contains all other chits
• PlayerChit: Represents individual players with their own state
• GameDeckChit: Deck of cards with shuffle, draw, and staging
• GameBagChit: Bag of pieces for random drawing
• DiceChit: Animated dice with customizable faces
• SparkChit: Interactive UI elements in panels

Outlets

Chits can have named outlets (using the @ChildOutlet decorator) where other chits can be placed. The OrderedOutlet class manages ordered collections of chits with support for splaying, stacking, and positioning.

Turn System

Games are structured around the Turn class, which provides:

• Asynchronous game flow control
• Player picking (choosing chits or buttons)
• State management and history
• Undo/redo support

Rendering

3D Rendering via ChitRenderSpec:

• Custom geometries and materials
• Camera positioning with CameraSpec
• Lighting with LightSpec
• Highlights and outlines
• Splay configurations for card fans

2D Rendering via ReactCanvas:

• Declarative JSX-like syntax for canvas layouts
• Text, images, colors, and shapes
• Responsive layout system
• Icon support with customizable icon maps

Installation

While this is an npm package, it is highly recommended that you use the @pretty-chitty/cli package to install and run Pretty Chitty games. This cli utility will:

• Initialize new games from a boilerplate
• Run a hot-reloading playground for local development
• Create and optimize spritemaps for fast loads
• Build and upload to CDNs

Development

Build

yarn build

Run Development Server

yarn dev

Run Tests

yarn test

Type Checking

yarn compile:check

Key Features

• Decorator-based annotations for defining chit outlets and properties
• Automatic state serialization with support for hidden properties per player
• Hot reload support in development mode
• Game designer UI for testing and debugging
• Customizable themes with player colors and avatars
• Panel system for showing detailed chit information
• Gallery view for browsing game pieces
• Time travel debugging with match replay

License

This project is licensed under the Pretty Chitty Source-Available License v1.0.

Allowed Uses:

• Personal, educational, or hobby projects
• Free digital games
• Supporting physical board game sales

Not Allowed Without Permission:

• Commercial redistribution
• Selling or monetizing the software
• Publishing modified versions publicly

For commercial licensing: [email protected]

See LICENSE.md for full details.

Contributing

This is a source-available project. Public redistribution and derivative works are not permitted under the license. For contribution opportunities or commercial partnerships, please contact [email protected].