No Time To Play

The good news about amateur game development is that you can take your time. The bad news is that you can take forever to make a game. Much as I hate working under pressure, I must admit that a small amount of it can be useful, and I don’t have any.

Anyway, this is what I’m working on right now:

If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s not unlike a cross between Pac-Man and Robots, except with a whole bunch of twists. But it’s not that simple; the concept went through a good number of iterations before taking the current shape.

One of my goals was to make a game that was different from the last one. And because my previous game was:

• a fixed-screen,
• mouse-driven
• shooter,

this one pretty much had to feature:

• running around,
• scrolling and
• the WASD keys.

(If you’re wondering why not the arrows, it’s because Web browsers handle special keys each in its own way, and it’s not worth the trouble. Yes, there are compatibility libraries; no, I’d rather not tie my game to any external dependencies if I can help it.)

I wanted to do things more cleanly with this game, so I designed it to run largely on integer arithmetic, and relied heavily on canvas transformations. Turns out, I still had to use a good number of floating-point multiplications (mostly for the vector graphics), but overall the code looks much better.

Speaking of graphics, another improvement is in the much higher variety. I gave each game element its own distinctive shape and color, and I’m really happy with the result. And you haven’t seen the game in motion yet! Speaking of which, it’s time to work on it some more. See you around.

Finally, some game development again by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.