Pigs in Blankets

Belfast-based games development.

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Creating a 2D game engine in WebGL. Part 3: Drawing offscreen

https://github.com/jamesrehabstudio/webglEngine/tree/part3/js Tools used: https://www.google.com/chrome/index.html https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ http://www....

Continuing the WebGL game engine tutorial

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Everyone needs a place to drink

When you’re through fighting your foes, it’s good to have somewhere everyone knows your name and they’re always glad you came. Monstervania offers the player an opportunity to invest in the town to create an incredible place where they can get some rest.

We have spent a couple of days designing a few potential pubs. From the most ornate and elaborate

To the total grott.

Be sure to support your local community.

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Smoothing a hard stop

It’s tough to explain programming problems sometimes. It’s all the more frustrating when your solution seems novel and clever (at least to a non-engineering computer scientist), and you want to tell people about it. But I’ll try my best to share this as best I can.

So the problem is our player has a dash ability. That is the ability to move beyond their natural walking pace to quickly move out of the way of danger. The goal is to make this easily accessible without making it faster than the initial walking pace less the player uses it instead of walking. 

The initial temporary solution was to calculate the dashing time, the speed of the dash and STOP the player dead once they had covered the same distance a standard walk could achieve within the time, allowing a hypothetical walking player to catch up.

As a graph this movement looks like this:

The X axis represents the dash time (from 0 to 1), the Y axis is the speed of the player (1 being the walking speed) The above assumes the dash travels twice as fast as the standard walk, so once it has traveled half its time, all forward velocity drops to zero. The total ‘area’ of this function is 1.0, the same as a standard walk.

In game it looks like this:

It’s not very nice.

Opening up a graph editor and using the trigonometry I learnt in my GCSEs, I used Cosine function (a function that takes a gradient and oscillates it with a smooth up/down curve) and alittle algebra and came up with this:

X is time, Y is speed. So as you can see, the total ‘area’ of this function is still 1.0, so in the same time the player has traveled the same distance. By using cosine on the time multiplied by half Pi, it creates a curve that starts at one and smoothly approaches zero. To compensate of the additional ‘area’ created by this we multiply it first by PI again, and a speed coefficient we calculate by dividing the initial walking speed (1.0) by the dash speed (2.0) multiplied by the time taken (1.0). In our example this is equal to 0.5. The result is a much smoother dash, that covers the same amount of ground. In game that looks like this:

With games development, Trig is your best friend. I’m always finding new ways to solve complex problems with it.

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Take a dip in the hot spring to restore your weary soul. 

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A showcase for this week’s new roster of monsters. Beast Lords already has over 40 kinds of enemies. No doubt I’ll be including a monster codex so you can keep a record of those you’ve encountered. 

Only 3 temples to go, and then I start to hook them together and add some polish.

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Fighting the deadly Poseidon!

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Update

Work is going great on Beast Lords. We showed the demo off right here in Belfast at the local “Play my demo” event. A lot of positive feedback, but the big thing we noticed was just how hard the game was. It’s very easy to become a master of your own game when you’re the one balancing the controls and player movement. If you make the game challenging to you, a new comer doesn’t stand a chance.

Saying that, I do like tough games, so I think the solution is just to introduce them gently.

Since our last post, the game has under went bit of a face lift. We’ve redesigned a lot of the dungeons and the player sprite. The first pass was pretty simple, a little 16x32 sprite, reminiscent of older NES games.

I liked the little guy, but he was just a little too primitive. The new sprite:

Not only does he look a lot better, but there’s a lot more frames of animation; more than just lovely to look at, this new sprite feels a lot smoother. transitions into actions are clearer and his silhouette is more obvious and readable.

For now, we’re designing our dungeons. We’re hoping to speed things to a quick release now that our controls are locked down tight, and our animations look well!

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Visit Original Link

A little diddly I was messing around with.

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It’s finally up!

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Visit Original Link

I updated an old track to better fit into the world of Beast Lords

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The first screen filling mid level boss! A giant toad!

[currently841pm]

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Making Beast Lords look pretty! I’ve been polishing the game over the past few weeks- mostly visual stuff. I want the game to look its best when I start promoting it!

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Visit Original Link

Another Track for Beast Lords.

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Visit Original Link

New piece of music for Beast Lords. I’m getting out of Chiptune and moving into something a lot more 90s.

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The stand alone is coming

I’m sorry there hasn’t been a release of late. I’ve begun the enviable, but difficult task of converting Beast Lords to WebGL and moving it to a stand-alone application.

What does this mean? Well first of all, wide screen! WebGL will also allow us to do more interesting things visually and have more sprites on screen. A stand-alone will remove the download cap on the game. As a web app we couldn’t overload the game with content, since that would have the player waiting too long to download all the files they need. As a stand-alone we can add lots of music, more sprites, more areas, more sound effects, and generally just more.

What happens next? Hopefully we can get the game up on some platform so you can easily download it and get any necessary updates. But until then, I’ll do my best to keep you up to date with the progress right here.

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Beast Lords Version 0.1.8

http://pomedia.co.uk

Change Log:

Item unlocks and Data saves. Some internationalization. Introduction area. Removed easy mode.