Gamejam: Quick Recap

11/09/14

It's not over, yet, but I totes neglected to blog each day of the Game Jam.

11 hours remain.

A tech demo I had working early this morning can be found here, Stephan.

Wait, would an iframe work fine here?

Awesome.

And that right there is why I wanted to do an HTML5 game, Stephan. Though, apparently emscripten would let me do something similar with C. And I bet there's some python equivalent, too. But who asked you, Stephan?

But anyways, I very quickly skimmed through options via the Web Developer's Cookbook and its companion Github repository. My fork of it (no changes) can be found here. And you can even browse the repo and play the games on this website at this link.

Browsing options and setting up my site was a good chunk of the beginning of the first day after we received the theme of the game jam.

Oh, yeah: "we". Also: "theme".

I'm jumping a bit ahead, aren't I?

I arrived basically right on time to the game jam at o'seventeen hundred hours, Friday the 7th of November. It was uncharacteristically warm for the week, but still cooler than is normal on a....

Trying to narrate an actual story with descriptions and stuff is time consuming. I arrived at 5 p.m. I setup my computer.

Teams were made. I teamed up with an old friend and a completely new guy. The new guy really wanted to make an HTML5 game, so a person I teamed up with last time switched groups with him.

It all seemed to work out. We were told the theme.

                      Wonderland

We quickly devised a game composed of shapes that ate each other to grow bigger. I was inspired by the "Eat Me" food in Alice in Wonderland that made her change sizes. New Guy was inspired by the early stages of Spore. Later it transformed more into a clone of Osmos.

Then Me, My Friend, and New Guy started exploring HTML5 options.

After sometime playing with the recipes we decided on crafty.js. The rest of the day was pretty painful. Crafty is confusing. In fact, Stephan, you might just say that Crafty is crafty.

Rendering any given shape via mathematical methods isn't trivial in Crafty. I wasted a lot of the first day struggling with circles. New Guy didn't give up, and kept working with them. I gave up, and stuck with squares (as you see above).

Those hours spent struggling with circles were not wasted, however. It mangled my brain and blew my mind, but I came out with an appreciation for how Crafty is constructed.

That's not to say there aren't some serious problems with Crafty, however. Some weird, inconsistent behavior abound (to be fair, that's how all javascript libraries are now, it's a wild west and standards aren't established). For example, "Click" is not a functional event for right-clicks, but is for left-clicks. "MouseDown" is functional for all kinds.

Lots of stuff like that, and if you peruse the Crafty site, the documentation is sparse (again, like lots of javascript libraries).

Anyways, the current setup (consistently updating) can be found here. The repo is here.

10 hours remain.

We'll talk more about this later.

I have work to do.