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

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.

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.

The Final Twist - Sunday 9pm - Release

So at the end of my weekend I'm pretty much done. It has been a bit move of a mission that I had imagined but I am happy with my final product - I think it has a good finish and is definitely a playable game on a smart phone for a few minutes.

This is my final release at the time writing try it out - play some; it's probably good or bad for your hands. The source is available as usual.

Almost Twisted - 3pm Sunday

I took an early relax last night so didn't end up doing much work on the game after the last demo; however unexpected free time happened to me this morning when a regular commitment was cancelled so I've got my progress back on track and at this point have a mostly working game which is quite fun to play.

Have the the playing surfaces responsive  so they work nice on all devices now (I hope).

It's now got start and completion screens, and a scoring and timing system. There is still some significant work to be done tidying up the graphics and display css; and I'd like to add a few more small features to keep the game interesting; and I'd like to record the highest ever scores in local storage. (also analytics!)

We'll see in a few hours how much of that I get done.

All Twisted Up Saturday 3pm

Walked the dog and had a bit of fun this morning before returning to my game - I've added the basic rules enforcement for my latest demo and it accurately shows and count lifting the wrong fingers. The game also indicates which finger to move and what to target on the touch panel.

 I've also tidied the graphics a bit and made an overlay layer. This is the latest demo which works on most fairly big touch screens. Tonight I will made it responsive to different screen sizes.

The Twisted Rush 8pm Friday

I've got the spinner working nicely at this point. The graphics need some improvement but the movement is looking good.

This new demo spins the double spinners every 10 seconds or so; although it doesn't enforce the rules or keep score you can play along with it on a multi-touch device - so I got to play it some and the idea mostly works at the moment on my tablet.