No Time To Play

Vector graphics are convenient in games, especially for a programmer with little artistic skill such as myself. But there is only so much you can do with them. Sooner or later, you’re going to need raster images, and those have an interesting characteristic: being external to the code, they have to be loaded explicitly; we call them assets.

Now, in the general case, that’s not an issue; you simply load the assets before starting the game. But web browsers load images asynchronously. And so it happens that the tech demo for Ballistic: Snowballz was only displaying a blank background on first page load.

The solution was obvious: write a preloader.

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As living legend Chris Crawford points out in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, any game must revolve around a central concept. So when I started thinking of a new one, the first step was to figure out what the game was going to be about. I had already decided to make a first-person shooting game, simply because they’re so immersive, and it’s an uncommon perspective in 2D, so it wasn’t going to seem too unoriginal. For the same reason, it was also an easy decision to have projectiles with ballistic trajectories. And since martial games where you go around shooting stuff with guns are oh so common, why not simulate a snowball fight for a change?

But in order to do that, we first need to make those snowballs fly.

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Ever since computers became capable of running actual videogames, developers were drawn to try and break free from the limitations of 2D graphics. This became possible with the advent of microcomputers, which were powerful enough to render wireframe 3D and even flat-shaded polygons. But for the most part they’d make do with tricks, simulating depth with the traditional sprites and some optical illusions.

How 2.5D works

Simply put, 2.5D is the generic name for faking 3D computer graphics with 2D. It usually comes in the form of isometric graphics. But there is another technique, that allows for perspective and even polygons, with extremely easy programming, as long as you accept a few limitations.

How easy? This easy:

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