16 3 / 2011
We have life!
(not our server)
Our multi-player development server has sprung to life and can now host multiple games in many rooms at the same time, awesome.
One of the main aims of the game is to make it as easy as possible to create and join rooms (ongoing games), it should also be easy to make your own ‘corner’ and invite your friends for a private game. The solution is to have the game name in the URL with a hash eg:
game.com/#roomname
This way you could create your own private room just by entering it into the URL - of course there will be a nice interface for the less technically inclined.
The next step is moving some of the core game logic that is already written on the client-side to the server. This should help in making games fairer, easier to manage and harder to cheat on. In particular powerups are still being spawned in different positions and times on each players screen… not ideal!
(Source: Flickr / jemimus)
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.
