Structured Canvas Language (SCL), or just Canvas Language, is a personal project that has been under continuous development for about ten years.
This page is my first action in deciding to build
in public. I frequently tweet updates,
about SCL on Twitter and related sites.
Follow @SCLanguage
Follow me if you support the #buildinpublic movement and if you're doing the same,
I'll follow back.
Flash used to be the primary way to create games in web browsers. I jumped in into it and created a rather large game called Cluster Chaos. Here are two game trailers I made for it at the time.
Soon after releasing that game it became clear that Flash would be expired, and browsers would upgrade their support for animations on their own.
I began taking the animation code that I created in Flash and converting it to Javascript libraries. No actual products came from this, just a 2D sprite library.
As I worked on this I started forming an idea. I wanted non-programmers to be able to put animations on their webpages without having to learn Javascript. I had a vague idea of being able to copy and paste an animation between webpages.
and Structure Canvas Language was born.
In the example above, you can probably see in the code exactly what you need to change to customize the animation (go ahead and do it). Easy-peasy.
Because you don't need to know Javascript.
Because you can type an animation right into a webpage form.
Because any site that uses SCL can share animations between them.
From the sites listed below, you can simple copy SCL code between them
and customize them for your own needs.
So after creating the first version of SCL I jumped straight into casual game development.
Structured Canvas Language was the first site where I used SCL. It did not succeed as I had hoped, but at least I got some good demos out it.
There is still the possibility of opening the game studio to the public again, we'll see how this new phase goes.
In 2019 I got into the GIF craze and I still do it. SCL is perfect for GIFs and doesn't have the same problems that game development had.
Editable GIFs uses SCL to make it easy for visitors to make GIFs. The GIFs are written in SCL and webpage controls allow for easy personalization.
My final goal of SCL is to license it out to other developers to use SCL to create plugins for different platforms. The WordPress plugin is just the start. There are many other platforms out there that support Structured Canvas Language, the integration tools just need to be written.
Contact me here or send me a message on Twitter if you're interested in working with SCL.
