introducing cartlet - a found software format
2025-06-07
if you've been reading my blog recently, you know that making videogames with bookmarklets has become a bit of a preoccupation of mine (lol)
in the process of making snakelet and WIZARD GARDEN i set some constraints for myself that i found interesting and fun: limiting myself to a specific subset of browser APIs, colors, keyboard inputs, etc. i also ended up creating a handful of tools for working within these constraints.
the result is something a little like a game engine or framework, a little like a fantasy console, but also not quite like those things. the term i've come up with for it is a 'found software format' which is admittedly a bit clunky but which i hope indicates that what i'm doing is recontextualizing existing APIs rather than inventing something from whole cloth.
anyway, if that sounds like your kind of thing, please check it out! i've made a page for it on my website here:
-> cartlet <-
if you follow that link you'll find a manual containing a getting started guide and a specification for the format. in addition i've packaged up the tools i created along with a few example programs to create a toolkit called cartletKIT. since the toolkit consists entirely of bookmarklets, i'm distributing it as a Netscape-format bookmarks file, so you can install the whole thing just by importing it into your web browser.
with the cartlet format, as much as i could i tried to lean into the material properties of the browser platform, such as always using the default size of the HTML canvas element (300x150) for the screen dimensions, or using the original 16 web colors as the color palette.
that said, on some level all these restrictions are to my own arbitrary taste - if these rules don't suit you, i encourage you to break them. either way, have fun! <3