ILLUMINATI NORTH
BooBoo
BooBoo is a unique, mini game engine/programming language, designed to make creating games from scratch fun and easy. The launcher, with its powerful API, and SDL2 DLL add just 3 MB zipped on top of your game. You can begin drawing shapes to the screen as simple as defining a void function plus a primitive drawing call. It's a bare-minimum engine and powerful API, allowing you full flexibility.
BooBoo's game engine (Shim) is lightning fast and efficient, and the BooBoo language's performance is adequate for games of any scale.
The download also includes a CLI version of BooBoo that supports text colour changes and unbuffered input, for making console games, apps and tests.
With the source code, you can do things like enable Steam achievements by adding an interface to the included Shim library's Steam support, use the BooBoo library to script your game/app in BooBoo or add extra instructions to BooBoo. You can also use it on Linux.
A BooBoo game is fully contained in a data/ directory or data.cpa archive (which can be created with the included compress_cpa tool.) Placing your data/ directory or data.cpa alongside the BooBoo executable (in place of the default data/ directory, which contains the launcher) will make it launch automatically when the EXE is clicked. You can also rename the exectuable to suit the name of your game. This gives you the ability to distribute a stand-alone game (BooBoo.exe, SDL2.dll and data.cpa, plus anything else you want to include with your game.) data.cpa archives keep all your files in one place, compress your files and they also load faster. data.cpa archives are loaded into memory at startup and files are loaded directly from memory instead of disk.
I built BooBoo after developing engines for around 2 dozen games (before being satisfied with one, which is what backs BooBoo,) and co-designing and developing the API for Allegro 5 (a game library written in C.) Extensive experience has gone into the design of the BooBoo API, and the code behind it. I was a game developer, primarily. I built engines to make games, and didn't want to spend the extra years perfecting an engine, which is difficult to make suitable for a large amount of games. Eventually, whether conscious of it or not, I spent 3-4 years on Shim, and version 5 is what BooBoo is using behind the scenes. If you'd like to use Shim with C++ directly, you can do that using the code downloads (unfortunately as I'm a solo dev, Shim is still undocumented, but the minimal example and some common sense (and header exploration) is all you should need.)
Media
BooBoo comes with a plethora of examples. Here are a few of the example games...
Documentation
Read the documentation here...
Example
Here is Pong in BooBoo...
AshEdit
AshEdit can be used to take advantage of BooBoo's tilemap features. Various styles of 2D tile-based games are supported. Regions can be marked with user-defined integers or bitfields, to mark those "question blocks" in your platformer or chests in your JRPG. Solid/walkable flags can be set, and in the inevitable case where you need to move things around and between layers, there are multiple tools to do the job.
AshEdit has a full suite of tools for creating and editing layered maps, from rich selections to macro recording.
You draw a "collage" of tiles in your favourite paint program (using the transparent colour where you want transparency) and paint with them using the pencil tool in AshEdit. Multiple tile sheets are supported. Tiles can be any size (just set it in the File menu) and you can select and paint with any rectangular region of tiles. The tile sheets can be edited in your paint program and reloaded in AshEdit with a click in the File menu.
Binary maps can be loaded and saved (and used with BooBoo) and pixel-for-pixel screenshots of the entire map can be saved (optionally with some layers turned on/off.)
All of this information is available to BooBoo games, which can also do modifications to the tilemap live. BooBoo is able to draw a slice of layers (or all layers) with one command that automatically culls invisible tiles for optimal speed.
Media
License
Copyright 2025 ILLUMINATI NORTH Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Downloads
Also available: Windows dependencies for the code (7 MB)