Monthly Archives: March 2014

One Game A Month

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I have signed up for One Game a Month (#1GAM)! The basic premise is to publicly declare your participation and then follow through on it. Getting a game finished monthly forces you to follow through to the end of a project repeatedly, learning new things every month about the process of creating a game. The “rules” are pretty loose, but if you cannot be honest with yourself, you won’t be getting much out of it anyway.

Speaking of which, I sort of put off officially participating until I had already finished my first game… Oh well, gotta have your priorities straight, right? For now you can find it under the Projects Page in the Menu above and it is called EmoSine (<- or just follow the link). The elevator pitch on this game is “Flappybird but with a gravity mechanic.” So far, feedback includes “difficult” and “addictive”, so not bad so far! Of course it could use a few additions as briefly discussed over at my post on html5gamedevs, but I need to get started on April’s game first!

EmoSine Screencap

Continuing on with 1GAM, my intention is to follow through on some very simple game ideas. I currently have a list of 6 or 7 that I came up with during a meeting for my full-time job in which I had some spare time. Some of those ideas include: an alternate take on an endless runner, playing with crowd dynamics, learn about the physics engine capabilities of Phaser using a Lego-like building game, something to do with minions, and more!

Javascript Tree and HTML5 Flies

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This is a progress update to my Learning HTML5 post. I completed the first two courses through SkillSoft about HTML5 and CSS3. I learned a bit about the new tags and attributes and what’s been deprecated and abandoned from older versions. However, what I was learning was not proving to be that helpful to my ability to develop an HTML5 game except the very short section on the canvas element. I decided to start fooling around with drawing on the canvas using JavaScript to learn more.

JavaScript Tree Thing

I had this image of a bunch of threads growing up and sprouting leaves and branches and sort of weaving together into a tree. The little tree thing growing there was a sad effort toward that end, but I wasn’t ready to try to build tree growing procedure at the time. Maybe when I get to exploring procedural generation I’ll revisit the visual I have for that in my head. Anyone know if it already exists out there?

One of the other things I said I would do using the List of HTML5 Game Engines was to pick an engine to dig into and learn. I found a few other resources in making my decision that might be useful to others:

Phaser

The game engine I decided to use is Phaser! Here’s a few places I’ve bookmarked as good resources so far:

The forum I found to help make my decision is also a great resource for Phaser development. As a curiosity I decided that it might be cool to port my flies over from the FleaGame. I used the starter project form LessMilk as the shell for my flies, but it turned into a very shoddy hack and hardly uses the Phaser framework at all… Anyway, here is a demo of the fly behavior minus the brief pause when they land that they have in the C++ Allegro version (because there isn’t anything for them to land on in this version).

Fly Movement Demo using Phaser


I did a little brain storming and generated a list of ideas for quick games to help me get into Phaser so expect some HTML5 games here in the near future! Along the way I’ll explore a few concepts that have been bouncing around in my head.