Sopwith - A playable demo of Day 17

Today the js13k contest is half way through of so - My Sopwith game is just about playable.
 I've mostly been checking off the basic game play features:

• The player's plane is full featured allowing a flip, guns and bombs.
• The world has smoke billows to show when planes go down.
•  The AI can fly a bi-plane (not well, but aggressively and fearlessly) and shoots me down often enough. 

A new playable demo is available here 

Use , (comma) and / (forward slash key) to fly up and down.

Use Z and X to control the throttle.

Use Space to Fire

Use B to drop a bomb

Use . (period) to flip the plane

Sopwith - Day 15 - Progress

I've been working on the Sopwith game for js13k for a week and am making some progress. I have not been able to allocate the all the time I would like but I have scrolling graphics; a few game objects and a pilotable bi-plane. It has a working keyboard interface and collision detection is working (although I'm not using it currently).

The system is rendering in pure SVG which seems to be working very nicely even when full screen scrolling chrome seem to be hitting 50+ fps.This is the first project I have seriously tried to use SVG and am pleasantly surprised by its flexibility, rendering speed and the general way it can interact with CSS.

Why SVG? I need two different teams using the same graphics with different colour schemes. Additionally I have several requirements to slowly change the appearance of objects to style them in different ways to replicate different era's of computer graphics. The ability to animate line widths, filters and gradients and modify line joins and line endings will all be required to smoothly switch the graphics during game play.

Currently my compressed file size is 3.4kb which I think is okay given that I have the terrain and most of the graphic objects encoded.

Here is a demo version - you can control the cyan plane using the , and . keys to go up and down and the z and x keys to control the speed.

JS13k Again - Sopwith calls me back to 1984

Its js13k time again and for 2019 the theme is 'Back'.

For the uninitiated js13k is a game contest which requires that you create a game in 30 days that runs in a browser and all told is less than 13kb of code - a very small amount.

This year I would like to do a homage to a video game first released in 1984 - BMB released the incredible, immortal 'SOPWITH'. I was 11 years old at the time and 4 (yes four) colour 320x200 CGA monitors were cutting edge technology.

The game looked exactly like this:

I played it a lot. (here are a whole lot of videos if you want to see or remember)

So this year I would like to make a cover-version of Sopwith in 13kb showcasing the original brilliant game play and expressing the amazing changes in video and audio between 1984 and 2019.

That's the inspiration; I think the theme of 'back' is going work nicely with some of the ideas I have in mind. The game has quite a few different moving parts: lots of sprites side scrolling terrain; some physics for the planes; collision detection; sound and chiptunes and an AI player capable of fighting tactically. So every byte is going to count as I go.

Ice-X Js13k Game Day 10

I've been having a lot of trouble finding time to program on my new js13k project but it is slowly coming along. I have procedural board generation working pretty nicely and have written a cool renderer for the board

Here is a graphics demo showing the board layout code and the board drawing.which should generate a different board each time you refresh.

Ice-x - js13k day 2 - Design

I've been working on paper looking for a good design for my RallyX-like game. Here are some of my initial design sketches.

2d - board layout idea

Screen with board and controls and 3d aspect

 And at this link you can see a little graphics demo (made with BIG images atm) which explores the general look and perspective using css animations and transforms.

js13k Time Again - Rally X

It come around to that time of year again when the js13k contest starts. You have to write a game, that runs offline, in 13kb of code - the theme this year is OFFLINE.

I've been thinking back to my childhood and remember a game called 'Rally-X'. My exposure to this game was on coin-operated arcade machines in the mid-80's. The game was so popular that one could easily play it well into the 90s and (like Pacman) you can still see it today tucked away in the back corner of some arcade parlours.

You can watch some play here if you wish. The basic mechanism is to find your way around a connected rectilinear maze and pick up little yellow flags - get all the flags to finish the level. Little red cars chase and corner you - if they hit you; you loose a life. This simple dynamic and only 5 or so board designs makes an intriguing, fun and complex game to play. It also has some pretty terrible chip-music. Although you can only see a small portion of the board a head-up display gives a strategic overview of the whole space as you play.

I think the mechanism will make a good starting point for my 13k game this year. I'll completely redesign the visual appearance and create a procedural way to generate the boards randomly and see how it goes.

The Lost Packets 50 Level Demo

After my successes in the js13k contest I have decided to explore making 'The Lost Packets' a full length commercial game.

With that in mind I have been implementing a couple of new mechanics that I had tucked away out of the 20 level game. My newest version has a new colour of packet (yellow) which has it's own speed an dynamics. Additionally a new tile set that involves a lot of shared spots on the edges of the hexes make loop generation easier and generally increases the density of the puzzle elements and therefore the complexity.

This demo shows my current game technology - the levels above about 30 are in no particular order but there are 54 of them!

My plan is to release a 60 level version on the play store (built with cordova), apple store (build with cordova), Kongregate and steam (build for windows/*unix/osX with electron).