Overall I’m very happy with my game. Not because it’s the best game ever, but because I finished it and it’s playable. I even managed to cram in a bonus if you keep playing.

My original idea was a sort of rouge like where you moved between connected battle areas trying to kill everyone in the world. I was going to have rooms connected with single directional paths so I could add some puzzle element. The world would have had a set number of bad guys in the world + a set number of allies.

When you leveled, one of your allies would turn against you (you are trying to destroy the world so you can be alone.) and you would have a 1-on-1 fight with them. If you won, you got their power.

I spent a few hours on the game design. Then almost 7 hours trying to make the game over world in pure html/css/javascript. Unfortunatlly I kept running into issues and I didn’t have anything to show for it!

So 3pm Saturday I took my girl friend to work and sat in Starbucks (where she works) until 11:30pm working on the game. I decided to throw out the over view stuff and switch to ImpactJS for my game engine. I made a ToDo list that just focuced on making an old school RPG battle screen with the player on the left and the bad guys on the right.

The menu was hard coded, no matter what you picked, the player would attack. The bad guys could not attack you back. And the selector icon would jump around the screen. But it looked like a game.

My next focus was on letting the bad guys attack back and trying to make the menu system pull from a move list. The idea was that as you played new special abilities would be unlocked. With the global move list, the bad guys now could attack back. I gave everyone a strength property that is random and renamed attack to “Punch”. Now there was some variety between game plays.

You would die, a lot. But I always intended for you to have help from allies (that you would later kill.) I came to a turning point in the game design. I didn’t have enough time to create the over world (because I had to throw the old one out.) or add allies.

I let my girlfrind play test it and asked her which way I should go. She voted for allies, the game was just too hard without them.

I added text to show health, and removed the still non-working inventory option. I added two special moves, a kick that was just a plus to punch, and a round house kick that was an instant kill. I added in special points so you could go a kick 3 times, or one round house kick each game.

I had to redesign the main game loop so all allies would attack, then all bad guys. I also made it so bad guys will always attack allies before they attack you. Since my first ally is ice man, I added the Ice Beam special attack. Ice man always uses the Ice beam, bad guys still always punch.

I added winning and loosing screens and improved the background image. I ended up with 5 different backgrounds. Three of the stone dungions that are just colored differently, an ice room and a fire room.

The game was basically working. Everyone could attack and die. The player could win and loose. And randomly the game would lock up and throw a bunch of errors and crash.

I was quickly running out of time. So I decided to ignore the bug because it didn’t happen very often, and improve the bad guys. The new images where made and my cat was turned into a cat/xmas tree because, uh … because I said so, that’s why. (and cats are freakin hard!) With some play testing I reduced the number of allies down to one at a time (picked randomly) and changed the number of bad guys to be random between 2 and 4.

I made a quick title screen and threw up some story text. And the game was done!

Almost. I had two hours left. So I dove into the code to find that pesky crashing bug. When the bad guys had finished their turn, if there was only a single bad guy left on the screen, he could take a second turn without checking if the person he was attacking was still alive. If he attacked someone that was killed, the game would crash. Bug fixed.

I made last minute balance changes, and added in a played counter. I still had the Ice Blast and Fire Blast attacks in the game, but no way for the user to every get them. So I descided to use the play counter. If you play enough games, the powers will unlock and you will get more than one ally at once.

It’s been a long 48hrs. I’m glad it’s over, but I had a blast doing it. I’m hoping for some good feedback, if people generally like it, I might go back and try to add some of the dropped features after the judging.

Thanks for reading!

Whoohoo! After some play testing and adding a few bonuses I’m done and the game is posted.

It kind of looks like a real game. I’m proud of that. I did do stuff I would never normally do when programming, but finishing is more important than pretty code.

If people leave me some good feedback I might continue working on the game outside of the competition. But for now, I drink!

It basically works. It’s missing so much from my original idea, but that’s the way it is. With so little time left I’ve desided to finish up what I have and make sure I can package and host it.

Once it’s hosted, then I can try and fix the bug that makes the game crash randomly.

It’s almost 5 am. I need some sleep. I’m working on getting the allies working since the game is next to impossible if you go alone.

The cool part is that you can fight with Punches or Special attacks (that use Special points) and the bad guys can fight back.

The player can now attack the bad guys and win! Woohoo!

The bad guys can attack back, they just don’t do any damage and the player can’t die right now.

I need to show the losing screen when the player dies (and let the bad guys attack!) and create nested menus so the player has more options than just attack.

I was thinking of showing health bars, but I don’t think I have time for that right now. some health text is probably all I need. If there are any healing spells, I’ll need to allow the user to pick which ally to use it on. Right now you can only pick bad guys. That reminds me, I need to add allys into the game.

Spend several hours at starbucks working on the game. Make some good progress since I switched to ImpactJS.

This is the battle screen, the major screen in the game. Left side is the user, right side of the bad guys.

After spending several hours last night and today, I have next to nothing to show for it. I’m been spending too much time messing around with the dom and making it draw shapes instead of actually making the game.

So I’m switching to ImpactJS and I’m going to focus on getting the core of the game done. Hopefully this means I’ll have some screen shots in a few hours.

It’s already 2am here, but I have an idea now. I think I can do the entire game with just JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. No canvas needed.

Although there will be no way for the user to save their progress unless I setup a database or use something like Titanium Studio. For now I’m not going to worry about it. If you leave the game you lose your progress. I need a working game before I need to worry about other things.

Depending on the theme I’m using

• emacs + evil
• JavaScript
• HTML/CSS
• Pixelmator
• ImpactJS
• jQuery, Backbone, RequireJS
• Maybe some CherryPy