05 3 / 2011
Powerup Time
This evening has mostly been focussed on improving how powerups are created, initalised and managed within the game. The powerup management is a pretty standard affair contained within the main game class, it keeps track of whether there is a powerup on screen and spawns new powerups at appropriate times in random positions
The powerups them selves are extended from a base ‘Powerup’ class (which is itself a child of the EaselJS Bitmap class). See code in public gist here. This class is kept very simple, each powerup simply overrides the init method with it’s custom logic.
Currently powerups are spawned after a set amount of time in a random position, they stay in this position until collected - This will change so that they move if not collected, this should add some drama as it has to be reached before it moves and protect against the really rare occurance where a powerup could spawn in an uncollectable location.
Next up: character animation!
02 3 / 2011
I have decided to start this blog about two weeks into the development of the game as a way of keeping track of myself, the game and also as an avenue to share tricks and tips learnt through the development process as HTML5 game development is still a fairly new pursuit.
What do we have so far?
At this point some of the groundwork of the game has been decided upon and put in place. Animash will use the html canvas element to render the playing field rather than flash and we have also forked EaselJS to help with managing the canvas and various spritesheets used within the game.
Sounds have not yet been started, but the current plan is to use SoundManager2 - a popular javascript library that supports the html audio tag but can fall back to flash if necessary. A bit more research is needed to see if the audio tag alone is supported by enough browsers.
On the graphics front there is currently no designer on board, I have a few people in mind who I will be approaching about the project once a working demo is in place to prove the ‘fun factor’ and commitment.
If this has piqued your interest at all don’t forget to subscribe as I will be talking gorey technical detail as things progress.
