Sunday 30 August 2015

js13k - half way today - Getting Prettier

Today is the mid-point of the js13k contest time. I have been adding features and generally prettying my idea up.

I had hoped to have a fully playable level of the game by this point but I am still a day or two away from that - so a bit late but not very late. My current zip file size if 5296 bytes.

I have added a slew of new features
  • Base buildings and towers
  • New cargo-72 avatar - more robotic; more bright; more solid
  • New transparent gradient fill to change the tone of the ocean water with altitude
  • Ability to load cargo and carry cargo on the buggy

So here my latest demo - you can drive with A,D and space - you can go all the way right and load up the standard weight cargo and then return in reverse.

Wednesday 26 August 2015

js13K - Day 13 - More Cargo-72!

A few more days, a few more features:
  • Parallax background layer with it's own styling
  • independantly rotating wheels
  • curves and slopes; hillocks and dells
  • The buggy can jump
  •  All new text console which displays messages to the user

It's slowly coming along then - currently it's not very pretty but the hard parts are falling into place. After closure and zip the count is at 4,026 bytes - so far so good.

My latest demo can be played here - use A and D to move and <space> to jump.

Monday 24 August 2015

js13K - Day 11 - Cargo-72

Suddenly my js13k project seems to be coming on a little better - I seem to have the beginnings of a little game:
  • Terrain generation that gives me more or less randomness/control in different sections
  • regex styling functionality that makes the text art look cool by styling some characters differently
  • A buggy with independently rotating wheels controlled by keyboard, with different dynamics forwards and backwards
  • Physics for bouncing and ramping on the uneven terrain
  • Collision detection
After you google closure and then zip all of this you get 3.14kb - that seems pretty good to me at this point.

You can play the demo here  - use A and D to control the buggy.

Friday 21 August 2015

js13K Day 8 - A Name and a Bit of a Demo

I haven't had an easy week (or perhaps it was too easy) and so haven;t put a lot of time into the game.

I rapidly established that very wide (4000+ characters) spans were never going to work on mobile devices - so I've developed a system that breaks the levels into vertical panels so that I can add and remove then from the DOM dynamically to keep the bits the browser has to render to a minimum.

I also decided on a name 'CARGO-72' of which I am very fond.

Here is a demo of the terrain modelling of a typical long level.


Saturday 15 August 2015

js13kgames Day 3 - Design Docs

I've got other priorities this weekend but I promised to post the design docs I've been working on. I played Moon Patrol a lot when I was less than 12 years old - these designs and the general aesthetic I wish to invoke owe a direct debt to that game.

On paper...















And some details copied from my documentation:
Game consists of 10+ short missions. Each mission involves going over the terrain twice once forwards in the buggy’s best mode then backwards in the buggy’s weaker mode.

Ascii art to generate stuff - only the ‘solid world’ will have a strict Scale and orientation - everything else will use a rectilinear bounding box but be free to use altered scales and changing rotation.
The game is 2D with parrellax backgrounds.

Missions will be randomly generated from mission decks.
Controls: faster/slower + jump + fire + weapon rotate

Features:
  • old-school arcade game feel
  • subtle narrative
  • over and under the sea
  • ascii art
  • chip-tunes
  • sound effects
  • type out mission control texty stuff with good copy
  • analytics

Friday 14 August 2015

js13kGames Day 2 - Working on reversed

Yesterday was the start of the js13kgames.com contest; the theme for this year is 'Reversed'.

The idea for the contest is that you have 30 days to scratch write a HTML5 based game that ships in under 13kb total zipped size. For the non-technical that is a very small amount of stuff to organize into a game.

I completed last year with Strata; of which I am proud but had to write in under 10 days because of my own travel plans.

This year I have much higher ambitions. I want to make a complete if not particularly original game. For me complete means all of these: good game-play - playable for significant lengths of time, player development and skill, polished visual look, sound effects, chip-tune music and a sense of narrative progress.

All of that in 13kb - the text is this post is about 6% of 13kb.

I've got a pretty plan - will publish my sketches tomorrow.


Tuesday 11 August 2015

Game 6 - TextFlight - Release

Although this blog has been kind of silent on the subject I have been steadily working at my ascii art based flyer.

I am proud to have implemented sound for this game (a feature that always gets left on the backlog) - in the spirit of the ascii art the sound is all algorithmically generated; no sound samples were used. I've also created three distinctive worlds which demonstrate the general flexibility of HTML, CSS and text in general - all the 'graphic' elements are rendered using text DOM elements.

My final version only works in chrome on a desktop (although it mostly looks okay in firefox):Take a look at the game here.

As ever the source is free for all here so clone, fork or copy.