Jérôme Sénaillat

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!