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.

Text Flight - Got Collisions!

Despite ongoing challenges on my time - Grahamstown National Arts Festival and a week of serious illness - I have been pushing on with the text based game and tonight did the hardest part of the coding - character level collision detection on the ascii art.

The terrain generation has been improved significantly since the last version and a new minimal look on most of the art work. In this, my latest demo the plane flashes red on collisions - be warned this code works on desktop chrome only as far as I know - firefox seems to mostly run it atm but makes some z-index mistakes.

TextFlight - Trials and Tribulations

I have been making very slow progress on this my sixth game - the technology is cutting edge and fairly unreliable. A week or so ago I had realized that this game wasn't going to run on ANY IE version because the 3d transform support is partial - this week I found that the game was reliably crashing firefox and only actually worked on Chrome.

Interestingly the current version does seem to run reliably on FF so there must be something specific I'm doing that is confusing FF in some contexts. I have also discovered that many of my assumptions about the browser units 'em' and the width of the fixed font are not in general reliable; a solution I need to fix if I have any chance of implementing collision detection.

On the plus side the system is auto-generating infinite terrain and cleaning up the terrain behind it - also it looks quite pretty currently. So despite being desperately behind time on this one I will continue with it at least to have a fixed course length and crashes.

If you want to take a look (and fly) you can fly with the AWSD keys here.

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.