I am really happy with my final game - I think it plays well and is a elegant little art piece that reflects my history and interests.
My decision to use SVG for all the game elements turned out very well. The various graphics efforts and transitions between them depend entirely on SVG/CSS facilities: control line butts and line joins; to animate stroke widths and fill colours; animate opacity of individual strokes or fills; highly customised gradients and patterns. I had no performance issues with SVG - I expected to have to mess around optimising the scrolling and setting CSS will-change values but in the end the game was side scrolling the terrain (which in 1984 mode is made from hundreds of tiny line segments to be pixellated) with tens of animated objects on the screen and still holding 50fps .SVG provides the blur and offset filters for some of the modern 2009 era effects.
Additionally, because SVG uses of an arbitrary unit system, the 'minimap' was extremely easy to implement with almost no new code.
My final product was only 10kb of the available 13kb. I wished I had a bit more time, I would have loved to implement a few more things:
- Sound Effects: I planned to do the same tricks across the eras with the sound effects - from 1984's drones and beeps to 2004's polyphonic stereo sounds.
- Music: Some cute chip tunes would have been nice.
- Better 2004 graphics: A very better implementations of the 2004 look - using the gradients with more subtlety; using transparency more; sexier control panel for the 2004 look with some text effects..
Overall I am very happy with my final product (and I got a mail from the original author of Sopwith!).
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