Game 6 - Text Flight

I have got a lot further with the code and layout on my ascii flyer over the past week. The ascii art library is now able to separate solid bits from absent bits and can color specific sections of the art differently.

The world is looking good and I'm mostly happy with the glider.

In this demo you can move the glider left and right using the A and D and fly up and down using W and S.

Game 6 - An Endless ASCII Flyer

I want to use these winter months for training missions - I have two big areas of expertise I want to explore: ASCII art and Facebook/Parse/Social platform technology.  I have two projects on simmer that need to use the social platform code: a blue sky personal project and a commercial educational game system which is in the wind.

The ASCII art is something I have been vaguely interested in for some time and was hoping to get some creative experience with it before the js13kGames challenge (in September). Given the massive restrictions such a challenge has in resources I think that I could build something quite beautiful from ascii characters without requiring much storage.

In that spirit of practice for this month I'm building a  fairly simple retro-flyer game: you get to steer a clumsy glidery thing left and right and control its altitude as you fly through a tron-like tunnel built of ascii art. I hope to build it as a endless game with auto-generated levels.

I am going to implement the project using the HTML DOM model and 3d transformations; I'm not sure if my final product is going to run on mobile devices - I am designing it around desktop and keyboard use but I would like an alternate control system for tablets.

So far I've got no code but I do have this cute art demo using only CSS and HTML.

Game 5: Release

I thought I had finished up this game a couple of weeks ago and was just waiting for artwork but as I played it I realized that it would be much cooler if it had many more words - ideally thousands more.

So with that thought in mind I downloaded a list of English words, talked Libre Office into calculating a heuristic function for each word (and learned once again that spreadsheets are much weaker tools than they appear) and generated some serious word lists.

I added some tutorial text; credits screen and made the css responsive.
I also received lots of cool artwork from contributors and have added a couple of new bits myself.

So my final version of the game appears here . As ever you are welcome to view; judge; copy ; or mod the source (including the graphical resources).