I’m working on a new game which is sort of a missile command meets space invaders sort of thing. So far just drawing/scanning/design is done. I really like doing games based on my (on paper) doodly drawings. Tomorrow morning I’m off to deal with some medical stuff that may or may not consume most of the day, but I’ll poke around at this game over the next week as I have time… Our move is officially Tuesday so making sure everything in boxes has to come first!
Nefarious visited her grandmother this weekend so that she could have a big family easter with her three young cousins, and one of the things they did was an easter egg scavenger hunt (I did one for her on her first real Easter years ago). When she got back, she hid all her easter eggs around the house and proudly made a series of notes for Caitlin and I to follow — below is the starting note (which, to translate, says “look in the bathroom and you might find an egg”). Caitlin’s parents visited this weekend as well, and brought along a couple new books and other goodies for Nefarious, so we took a break from reading The Black Cauldron and did Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus yesterday and Polar Bears Past Bedtime today, both cover-to-cover. The books were both thoroughly enjoyed by her, and held her attention well for the three or so hours total of reading.
Other than that, stuff is slowly being put into boxes and we’ll finish off the move either at the end of this week or the start of next. I can’t wait to start utilizing the space. Oh, and the other good news is that it seems there’s a circus school in the building (or something like that).
Edit/Update II: Major play change! I’ve added some new bricks and levels, but more importantly, I’ve changed the paddle mechanism so you can hit with different amounts of force, and most interestingly, rather than the ball moving in a straight line, it moves with GRAVITY. It’s a totally new game now! Try it out, let me know what you think.
Edit/Update: I’ve added a new brick type at Caitlin’s suggestion (indestructible bricks), and there are now new level designs. The game is pretty “complete” now. Enjoy, and do feel free to use the source code for help in your own projects.
I put together another Javascript test/demonstrator, this time in the form of a Breakout/Arkanoid type game. It’s all Javascript with no Flash or plugin elements. It handles mouse interaction, collision detection, animation, multiple levels, score keeping with custom font, pre-loading code (it doesn’t render until it’s done loading the images) and a bunch of other stuff. The code is all clearly commented. It’s my third project in Javascript so I expect there are better and less buggy ways to do things, but it still might be useful to someone. There are some unfinished issues (the paddle reflection code needs work, double collisions are handled wrong, there’s a condition where the paddle stops working, and there’s some minor bugs in the pause/restart/up-level code) but I’m not motivated to spend more time tweaking it.
Click to check it out.
By the way, I’ll mention that doing this was inspired by Google’s Chrome Experiments which show off some of what you can push Javascript to do. You can do some pretty remarkable things with it — although it’s also quite interesting what you can’t do.
Other than that, I’ve watched Friday’s finale to Terminator: TSCC a couple times now… I really think it’s a brilliant show with a deliciously complex story, and I sure hope it survives — the ratings leave a little to be desired, and the richness of the story make it hard for new viewers to pick up on — into season three. Love it!
I made another Javascript-based animated webpage. To be clear, there’s no Flash on this at all even though it has lots of effects that would normally be done in Flash. It has a multi-level animated background, a multi-level animated foreground, animated and state-changing widgets, handles resizing, should work in all current version browsers, and has clearly documented code if you want to see how it works. There are definitely still things on the to-do list, including a cleaner load routine that puts up a “loading” screen until the images are loading. (Pre-loader patched in!) I left it without that for now in part to illustrate how it works. Anyway, here it is, click away. Pure Javascript, no Flash.
