Category: Game Development

Weekly Recap of 1 Hour Daily Game Jams

@mdiebolt and I review our daily 1 hour game jams over the past week. Audio levels in games are still too loud.

First 30 Days:

Week ending 04-14-2012:

I find that doing these 1 hour jams every day really helps to focus my game design skills. Who’d have thought that practicing something for at least an hour every day will make you better at it? Now when Ludum Dare rolls around 48 hours will seem like a 2 year dev cycle.

Some of my Favorite Contrasaurus Comments

one of the STUPIDEST games i have ever wasted 5 minutes beating…. and OMFG! 3700 BC? are you f*cking kidding me? the T-rex lived in the CRETACEOUS period. (between 85 and 65 million years ago) You really believe that T-Rex was still around in the Minoan’s discovered bronze? – anonymous

Dear anonymous, if that is your real name… It is a well known FACT that the MODERN TIME MACHINE (circa 1984) is only capable of travelling within a several thousand year range, so explain THAT. How can a DINOSAUR be brought into the FUTURE if it lived millions of years BEYOND THE RANGE OF TIME TRAVEL? – Yahivin

Pixie App Widget Test

I’m testing out embedding a Pixie app widget in my blog. If it doesn’t show up in your RSS feed try it on the main site.

Here’s a little platformer app that I’ve been making in Pixie. I started it a week ago and polished it up during TIGJam.

http://pixie.strd6.com/developer/apps/14/widget

This widget embedding is a great way to share games created in Pixie with the world. Additionally, because it is an embedded widget, it receives updates automatically as you update your game!

Contrasaurus Launch

It’s finally here, the day we’ve all been waiting for. A Legendary Hero is born: Contrasaurus.

Contrasaurus

Synopsis

You are a dinosaur. The year is 3,700 B.C. You are summoned into the future to save America from the dark Communist forces that are amassing in Nicaragua. After you complete your mission and become the most decorated top-secret military dinosaur in history, you discover a terrible truth. Finally you seek out those whom you depend on most, only to have them confirm your darkest suspicions.

Gameplay

Experience humanity’s greatest dream: to be a dinosaur covered in weapons blasting through enemies. A carefully modeled and animated T-Rex. Six levels with beautiful parallax backgrounds. Five epic boss battles. A machine gun, flamethrower, laser monocle, and much more!

Technology

This game was painstakingly created with blood, sweat, tears, and HTML5. The core matrix transform library was spun out as Matrix.js. Additionally many of the core language extensions, sprites, sounds, and canvas libraries are working their way into The Pixie Game Platform.

Credits

Programming
Daniel X. Moore
condr

Artwork
Backyard Ninja Design (Sprites)
My Name is Wool (Backgrounds)

Useful JavaScript Game Extensions: Number#floor and Number#ceil

Parts 14 and 15 of my 256 part series on useful JavaScript game extensions.

JavaScript is missing a lot of features that help a language be object oriented. I don’t see why since they are so easy to add.

/**
 * @returns The number truncated to the nearest integer of less than or equal value.
 *
 * (4.9).floor(); // => 4
 * (4.2).floor(); // => 4
 * (-1.2).floor(); // => -2
 */
Number.prototype.floor = function() {
  return Math.floor(this);
};

/**
 * @returns The number truncated to the nearest integer of greater than or equal value.
 *
 * (4.9).ceil(); // => 5
 * (4.2).ceir(); // => 5
 * (-1.2).ceil(); // => -1
 */
Number.prototype.ceil = function() {
  return Math.ceil(this);
};

Quest for Meaning a game made in two days for Mini-LD #21

Here it is, my entry for the mini-Ludum Dare competition. The competition theme is “biggest fear”, and one of my biggest fears is a meaningless life. Not only that, but a meaningless eternity. Pictures for Sad Children has a very similar theme at times and it helped inspire parts of this game (though I couldn’t find a good way to work in “monster most vulnerable when heaving with sobs”).

This was my first 2 day competition and I’ve learned some things. First, two days is a long time. Second, having real tools would make me very, very happy. Third, I thought that doing all the art and all the programming for a game would be hard, but it seems to use different parts of the brain, so when working on art the programming part of my brain is relaxing and vice versa.

This was the first moderately legit game that I’ve done all my own art on (title screen and chest graphics contributed by Lana). Also, my first game with a 4 color grayscale pallet. And additionally, my first major undertaking on the Pixie platform.

Working with the Pixie platform had some serious trade-offs. JavaScript is a surprisingly productive language with it’s functional and dynamic nature, but it has a harsh and brutal syntax. The platform libraries helped a lot to smooth some things out, and as they become more complete it will get better and better. I have high hopes for CoffeeScript, now that it is getting close to 1.0 I’m going to try using it on all my new projects and hopefully never go back. Another advantage was the tight art and code integration. It was trivial to create an image and have it appear in the game seconds later. The biggest drawback of Pixie right now is that the code “editor” is pretty much just a text area. There are no tabs, no integrated source navigation, no auto-save, no version control, and all kinds of other terrible issues. Also, there is no real tile editor, though Noel Berry pioneered the way by using the pixel editor as a tile editor before, and the surprising thing is that it’s actually not too bad.

Using Pixie to make art is awesome, but the game “platform” is not fleshed out enough for me to recommend making an entire game in it to everyone yet.

A special thanks to everyone who helped playtest and discuss various elements of the game throughout it’s stages: Boltz, McGrue, DavMo, Lan, MW… props.

So check out the game and let me know what you think. By making heavy use of Pixie, especially in time limited competitions, I hope to really iron out the core usage scenarios and make it amazing.

The future is bright and full of meaning.

Useful JavaScript Game Extensions Part 8, Number#mod

Part 8/258 Number#mod

For some bizarre reason, JavaScript does not constrain the result of the % operator to be between 0 and the base. This can make computing the index into an array or “wrapping” a negative number a small pain. This method gives all numbers an improved mod method that will guarantee they end up inside the array.

/**
 * A mod method useful for array wrapping. The range of the function is
 * constrained to remain in bounds of array indices.
 *
 * Example:
 * (-1).mod(5) === 4
 *
 * @param {Number} base
 * @returns An integer between 0 and (base - 1) if base is positive.
 * @type Number
 */
Number.prototype.mod = function(base) {
  var result = this % base;

  if(result  0) {
    result += base;
  }

  return result;
};

This makes jumping into an index much easier.

// Example usage
var result = array[n.mod(array.length)];

Though still not quite as nice as in Ruby where you can do:

result = array[n] # Ruby cares enough to make it happen

I love Ruby…