Blog
Idle game with PixiJS
22 November, 2018
Tried making a small game with PixiJS
Found out about it from when Google did their Halloween game doodle - an online HTML5 game where you play as ghosts collecting little flames.
It was a well-documented library, something I would work with again.
The other option was PhaserJS which is intended to be more of a game engine, and is based on PixiJS
Howl-with-mage is a simple idle game where you endlessly kill skeletons and can level stats to improve attacks.
PixiJS was great to use as an introduction to game development - points of interest were:
- Sprite sheets/texture atlases: Used TexturePacker
- Game ticks: Overcoming the strange anxiety over making a program compute something 60 times a second
- Game states: Switching from in-battle to enemy fade-in and fade-out
Browser game made with PHP and JS
28 October, 2018
Finished first version of Cocobox.
Features are:
- User authentication
- A pet and map for each user
- Shop - Spend currency on hats, trees, beds, map skin
- Travel - Move to different maps, search function for user maps
- Two public maps: Welcome Island and Dog Park
- Toybox - Equip inventory items
- Chat for each map
- Multiplayer - See and chat with other players in the same map
Initially the purpose of this project was to familiarize myself with Stripe, so that will be one of the next tasks for this project.
But for now, the project is considered whole/complete.
Some thoughts during developing this:
- jQuery did work fine for the purposes for keeping it light-weight, provided code is organized
- A pre-defined standard for all calls (collecting beans, equipping items, sending messages) would helped with keeping code consistent and easy to remember. In this project the functions were written as they were thought of
- It was very easy to set up a RPC API using CodeIgniter and jQuery
CuteIgniter - Prototying with CodeIgniter
27 September, 2018
CodeIgniter is a great lightweight framework for PHP development
but sometimes there can be a lot of setup involved before you can do anything unique to the project.
The setup would be finding/setting up user authentication, setting up row insertions from scratch, etc.
I created CuteIgniter to make that setup process easier.
It's a fork of CodeIgniter with some general useful things set up:
- User authentication
- Log in/Sign up
- Forgot Password
- Change Email
- Change Password
- Extend Authenticated_Controller for auth checks
- Mailing list
- Bootstrap 4
- Alerts with CodeIgniter flashdata
- Form validation with error styling
- HTML5 Boilerplate
The Authenticated_Controller will kick a user back to login if they are not logged in.
The mailing list is also a quick demo of row insertion.
Before October I plan to put in a starter for creation/update/deletion of rows.
Browser Game with PHP and jQuery
31 July, 2018
Cocobox is something I've been working on alongside Tintin these last couple months.
Initially, it was intended to use SVG graphics - which went fine, but I soon found that animating each part of the body ended up lagging the browser more than I would have liked. I had used the anime.js library - for multi-monitored setups I found it would lag video web pages that would be open on other windows. Also, jesus christ, the maths.
So I changed it to small pixel art instead, since in the end, I was interested more in the programming side of things and preferred to spent less time creating art assets, as the SVG route would have demanded a lot of. I've also always enjoyed the pixel style.
There is a specific mood I was after - something like "something you stare into at 3AM on the Thursday that your report is due".
Here is one with different cosmetics -
As far as backend goes, while there is still much to do, there's a decent amount done - The shop may have items, players may have currencies, pets and maps, their map location is recorded, maps have cosmetics saved. The tables so far -
The next big features would be public maps not owned by players, and a chat. Looking forward to those.
