I have been working the whole afternoon/evening today optimizing the speed of my platformer.  The button animation was damn slow because I was basically blitting the whole canvas several times during each frame.  It’s been quite a lot of work that unfortunately doesn’t show visually, but now the animation is quick enough for my taste.  I even tested the game in my eeepc and it works just fine.  With the new code I am precalculating some data and caching it, in order to reduce the amount of drawing/updating during animation.  This precomputation is quite heavy, but I am hiding it by using a function that works on the background while the user is playing.  Almost no slowdown noticed.

I also took a couple hours break in the middle of it or my head would explode.

Anyway, even though this is less than a sketch of a game, I’m happy with what I’ve done so far.  I have a basic engine for a platformer that runs on Html5/canvas, and I think I’ve learned a lot about this technology in the process.  Moreover, I have some codebase I might want to reuse in the future.  I don’t have much time tomorrow to dedicate to this project, which means that my participation in LD19 ends here.  There’s still stuff to do with this game.  I didn’t even start considering sound, which should not be a big problem (or am I too optimistic?).   I plan to keep on working on this project in the coming days, during the Christmas holidays.   One missing feature I’d like to implement now is multiple levels.  Right now there is one single level, there is no “welcome screen” and not even a victory condition that marks the end of the game.  But more important than that, I’d like to expand the code so more levels can be added.  Finally, the big elephant in the room is the total lack of content.  I’ve been so concentrated writing code that I didn’t bother to design a proper level 1.  But that’s (supposedly) the easy part, if I did everything right I should be able to just start designing the level and buttons and doors with just Gimp.

Oh, and I need to decide a title for the game and maybe change the name of the project (if github lets me do so, which is something I still have to look up).

The current prototype lives at http://chrisjan00.github.com/ld19platformer/

Take care,

Chrisjan

P.S.  Don’t forget to try GunFu Deadlands, if you haven’t already.  Works on Mac, Windows and Linux (but you need a mouse with a right button).

There’s a door that can be opened when the player steps on the button.  Now I need to refactor the code a bit and clean it up.  And probably redesign the level to fix the glitches.

I slept a lot, that was repairing.

I just updated the way levels are coded, I’m aiming to be able to do all the level design directly on Gimp, and have all the logic handled automatically.

Try it at the usual place

I just added a character sprite with some simple animation.  Better than just a white rectangle, I guess.

Uploaded to the usual place.

Time to get some sleep.

http://chrisjan00.github.com/ld19platformer/

I am taking a break now…

I fixed the issues with collision detection, and it mostly works.  It could still be that some glitch is hidden somewhere, but fortunately I couldn’t find it.

Also, it’s cool that I can just draw the background map with gimp and use it in the game.  Too bad I’m drawing with the mouse   You can just try the game in its current state at http://chrisjan00.github.com/ld19platformer/

The stupid collision detection has kept me busy for like 2h.  I thought I could just read pixels from a hand-drawn background image, but that turned out to be not so easy at first.

It’s still glitchy and I have to fix minor issues, but at least the script runs without timing out now.

And (thanks to qubodup for the help!) the app can be tested at http://chrisjan00.github.com/ld19platformer/

In theory this should be updated live as I push code to github, if I didn’t mess up too much with the configuration.

Whoa, it took a little while to get things running.  I had some bizarre problem with my public SSH keys on GitHub.

Anyway, I have a barebones html5 application.  This screenshot (pink rectangle on black canvas) means that the mainloop is running at 60fps.

The code can be found at https://github.com/ChrisJan00/ld19platformer

Oh, it turns out there is.  I’ve just found these instructions via google, in case anyone is interested.  It worked just fine for me:

DrPetter’s SFXR with Ubuntu

Hi there!

My name is Christiaan Janssen, you might remember me from GunFu Deadlands, a game I did one year ago in Löve2D.

I’ve decided to give it a try and enter Ludum Dare 19, in the “Jam” category. I am right now at Cafe Osswald in Berlin, in the context of the Berlin Game Developers Meet-Up.

For the LD game, I plan to use HTML5/Canvas. Probably GIMP for the graphics, and the audio… not yet decided. I’d like to just use SXFR if I find a port of it to Linux.