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).

Game 5: 80/20?

I've got a few more last cards to clean up on this project but I'm basically done - this version is a playable game with lots (but not nearly enough yet) of words and two comic strips.

I just have to write tutorial text; bulk up (and reorder) the word lists and I'll be done. Then I give it ten days to give my artistic cohorts a chance to sketch comics before a final release.

Quicker Than Hanging - Almost a Game

I have come just a little further and now have a version that includes some artwork and replayablility.

You can take a look at the latest if you like and see how the cartoon strip showing how close you are to death works.

I would ideally like 20-50 versions of this cartoon and as such would welcome art contributions from anyone who thinks it would be fun. I need 4 square frames arranged left to right in a single graphic file like so:

The frames represent starting state, one error, two errors and death respectively.
The idea is to do a cartoon of a fast and hopefully funny death.
I don't really care much about resolution but something like 2000px x 500px will look good on high end devices.
Black background: Goes with the rest of the (blackboard) theme but I have a plan for white background cartoons if you prefer.
Ownership: All aspects of twelvegamesayear (including artwork) I publish as free to use creative commons; your contribution will thus become cc.
Mail any art to me directly. (Sooner would be better but I'll release a final version at the end of the month)

Quicker Than Hanging - First Demo

A first demo for my newest game showing some of the font and graphics ideas:
http://elementalsystems.github.io/QuickerThanHanging/v1/

Quicker Than Hanging

For my next game idea I have a simple derivative of the famous paper and ink word guessing game 'Hang Man'.

My version is a little easier because more information is given but harder because it has less room for mistakes. More information in the sense that the bounding boxes of the letters are shown so one can distinguish the tall letters and those that go below the base line from most ordinary letters. Less room for error in that you only get to make three mistakes whereas traditional hangman allows 6/7/8 depending on how you play.

I am thinking of using handwritten look - probably like chalk on a black board. The bit of the board where the traditional hangman would go I want to fill with the same idea with cartoons of sudden ways to die (in square four frames - starting, 2 errors, death) - I was hoping to somehow source these by smiling hopefully at talented friends - otherwise I try some art myself.

The programming is undemanding for this project which is appropriate because I'm short on time this month.