It is a pretty long time since I last posted here. I guess I was busy. Or lazy. Or both. Or maybe I didn’t have anything worth sharing, and not enough traffic to bother. I am back for now, to share with the random wanderers who still visit this place something I have been playing with for a couple of weeks now.
I have been playing with javascript (and before that, flash) 2d gaming for a while now. I am clearly not a real developer, and know just enough code to put myself into trouble, as I often say. I tried to create things from scratch, with limited success, played with a couple of engines, until I found something I really liked, called Phaser.js.
Phaser is a 2d game engine based on the Pixi.js renderer, a self-described “2D webGL renderer with canvas fallback”. This means that depending on what your browser is capable of, it will render things either in WebGL or in Canvas. Pixi only takes care of the rendering, and Phaser adds to that a lot of useful functionalities for people who would like to create games, especially of the 80–90’s inspired 2d kind. It is very well documented, with a lot of examples, and the community is super friendly and helpful. What’s not to like?
Soooo… Here I am again. Back on an idea I started more than ten years ago, tweaking around could in the hope to make something playable that could hopefully someday release to the world.
A couple of things about this project:
- It’s inspired by several things. Oldschool platformers like Super Mario and Jet Set Willy (yeah, I am that old), with a dash of Maniac Mansion, Zelda (up to the Super NES) and the PC-Engine version of Adventure Island.
- It’s a work in progress. I am working on it on my free time, with no release date in mind for now. I don’t know when I will put a playable version online, or on Git.
- For now, this is how it looks like:
- Multiple levels, with multiple entry/exit points
- Monster with basic AI (ie. “don’t fall from cliffs”)
- Lives, and game over state
- All levels have individual names, hopefully to be used in a story (or not, who knows)
- It will be browser-based only, playable with a keyboard
- Code is super ugly, but kinda works. It probably would need a lot of refactoring before I let anyone take a look at it :)
- And here are the things that I would like to add:
- Coins (or diamonds, or whatever) to collect
- Shops, to by stuff with these coins
- More types of monsters (current types of monsters: one), some with smarter IA
- Save states, maybe passwords?
- Way more many tiles types, and a giant map inspired by Tokyo (I know…)
- NPCs
- Dialogues (maybe very simple, without any choices)
- One idea I have been toying with for a while is to make the visible surface decrease with time. The player would have to collect batteries (or something else) to keep the playable area wide enough.
Some that’s it, in a nutshell. I will be back to France at the end of this week for a bit of holidays, and won’t touch a computer for at least two weeks, but I am hoping to get fresh ideas on what to do next, and maybe how.
Feedback, comments and critics are more than welcome, feel free to leave some in the comment section below!