Game Thesis

Technology 2: Demo

I have posted a very basic demo to my website which can be found here. The main objectives of this demo were to:

1. get familiar with the way Crafty works and 
2. make some progress towards a proof of concept

I feel I have done this even though it is very ‘smoke and mirrors’ at this stage. I used scanned rough sketches for the scene and objects to emphasise the fact that it’s a demo - I am concurrently working on some more detailed concept artwork, and even so I suspect the artwork will change and evolve a lot as the game progresses.

At the moment what you can do with the demo is: see that the main character animates (blinking), and pick up the item on the bar which then gets added to the inventory visually, displaying on the menu at the bottom. At the moment it also adds a reference to the item in an Inventory array. To see this you can type Inventory.inv into the console.

There are still a lot of things I want to do with the demo, but not too much before scoping out the functionality needed in detail. I really want to use HTML5 Canvas for this project as much as possible, but some elements are in the DOM because they worked better there, other things will have to stay in the DOM (such as text).

My to-do list for this demo is as follows:

• Have a better system for changing text on the menu bar (dynamic rather than static)
• Refactor item functionality into a component (class)
• Add some basic dialogue interactions

Other important things to note: naming will have to be smarter when many more items are involved and in general. Objects will also have to be named in such as way so as not to conflict with any existing Crafty objects. Also, when it comes to sprites I will have to make sure I am not duplicating whole images unnecessarily (eg the characters’ eyes could be the sprite rather than the whole thing) as this will have an impact on performance (loading times etc).

So that’s the demo. I will keep you posted as to when you can see some more functionality added. In the meantime, the next post will be about concept art, I hope to have a couple of characters and a scene drawn roughly to give you an idea of what it’s going to look like!

Technology and Game Style

I know what you are thinking - it takes dozens of people many months of hard work to design and implement a game. I’m going to talk about a few of the ideas I have in mind for making this process easier for myself.

I have some experience with implementing games using Flash, however for this project I want to explore new technologies like HTML5’s canvas and also use this as an excuse to become more competent in Javascript. However, I am a designer first and a novice programmer at best so I will enlist the help of a Javascript game engine such as Crafty, which is open source. It uses a component based system, and for someone like me that’s very familiar with JQuery, this could be the go. There are lots of other useful resources for HTML5 game development as I am discovering such as this simple polygon tool which could be used for mapping out a scene.

As for the game style, I want to avoid characteristics that might involve a massive learning curve for me (such as anything physics-based), and am leaning towards a point-and-click adventure game like one of my favourite games of all time Day of the Tentacle, a style which is also alive and well today as evidenced by popularity of this kickstarter project. This style of game lends itself well to exploring and engaging in a story. The player will have a range of actions available (eg talk to, pick up, look at, walk to) to interact with scenes, other characters and items. Therefore one of the main functional requirements will be an inventory system. I am hoping to use Crafty to get a simple demo of an inventory system up in the next week or two.

Meanwhile, I am working on the content and the story, which with this simpler style of gameplay will be essential to convey the message of the game. Stay tuned, as story and content will be the subject of my next post!