Works in Progress Please see my portfolio for videos and published demos. I focus mainly on the core logic of the game engine, since that’s my primary area of interest/experience. These are my works in progress. I would consider Centipede feature complete, but there are open issues (both enhancements and …
Impatience waiting for a creature to come eat my ship led to a new crazy game mode! If you can survive 8 or so waves it gets easier, since the sheer amount of mushrooms makes the processing time longer than the interval timer, so everything slows way down. It’s a …
Step 1: Bask in the glory
Week-long test coverage montage Right into the danger zone Risin’ up to the challenge of our rival Oh darlin’ my heart’s on fire Lose your blues, everybody cut footloose Key takeaways beforeEach does not reset any spy that it sets. Will need to find another approach if this is needed. …
Loading the canvas libs Now that Karma is all wired up, I can start poking at the tests. The first problem I need to fix involves canvas-libs. knobsAndLevers uses the supporting object in canvas-libs to set a randomized initial spawn interval for the creatures. The usage is: this.spider.initialInterval = supporting.getRandom(this.spider.interval.min, …
Adding the Karma Test Coverage Tool I got tired of flailing around in the dark, so after turning on the lights, I started looking into test coverage tools. A few sources recommended Karma, so I went for it. It’s good (sorry). Code Coverage of Jasmine Tests using Istanbul and Karma …
Addressing some of the technical debt. Not very exciting. So bullet lists. DID: Set up Jasmine tests in Robotron (8 specs, 0 failures) Set up Jasmine tests in canvas-libs (4 specs, 0 failures) Moved supporting.js stuff to canvas-libs for both Centipede and Robotron Moved the Sound object from sound.js to …
Planning More gamepad updates today. This time, specifically for Robotron. I plan to integrate the controls pausing and twinstick shooting. Pause updates Updated pause to handle both spacebar and the + key. I should probably find an XBox controller and see if the indices of those buttons are the same …
Updating the gamepad library Today, I’m focusing on the controls library. Goal: add right stick capturing without breaking Centipede or Robotron. Robotron needs the right stick to handle firing. I could just leave controls.js alone and update it’s functionality in the game itself, like this: var theControls = controls; Then …
Pre-Feature Cleanup of Joust and Robotron Over the weekend, I made a serious dent in the technical debt for the other canvas games, Joust and Robotron. Before I did any of that, I poked at Joust and attempted to find the upper limit on the number of simultaneous player objects …
Demo Planning Adding: mushroom drops to the fly creature, and pause toggling with the gamepad. Fly Droppings Added mushroom generation to the falling bugs (the flies). This was straightforward. First, I set up an interval, and added a new function to intervalCreatures: dropMushrooms. dropMushrooms(creature) { if (creature != ‘flies’ || …
It starts out deliciously creepy. Every kid’s afraid of that thing in the shadowy corner in the middle of the night. So they huddle under the covers and pretend it’s not there but they know it’s there. When the game asked me to choose between call for Mom and Dad, …
Planning Yesterday, I left off with the gamepad controls working, but only in a way that basically broke all of the challenge of the game. The change allowed the player to move outside the defined player boundaries, which meant they could shoot from below the canvas with impunity. Hurray! Today, …
Session Planning I see a potential problem in the controls if more than one controller button is needed simultaneously. The isFiring returns a boolean on the FIRST button push it detects, and would ignore any additional entries in that list. This means if I press A, it will do the …
Today, I’m adding controller support to Centipede. (See the first controller commit.) Controls Code Cleanup First, the location of the controls currently doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I’m moving them to a new file, controls.js. On load, controls.addEventListeners will execute. There are no dependencies, so the script load …
Session Planning Back to centipede! Adding that falling bug creature. It should be pretty much exactly like the worm, only moving vertically, and will create mushrooms in its wake. Rename the worm object to something else like simple-interval-creature (is that a horrible name?). This could be combined with spider as …
Thoughts on Multiplayer and Matchmaking More streamlined matchmaking equals a less meaningful social experience. Matchmaking allows for a much higher number of unique inputs, but many games that use it lack any meaningful social aspect, since there’s no actual teamwork required. There’s no real strategy, just general patterns to follow. …
Can I say that? Does it make people think I’ll never focus or settle? Are they sighing and looking at me with frustration and thinking “Not this again?” Does it matter what they think? Answer to all: maybe. I have half a dozen self-published, unfinished games that nobody plays up …
Monster Hunter World removes a lot of the tedium of previous titles in the genre Capcom did a wonderful job addressing complaints about gameplay elements from previous installments that didn’t add value to the experience. This host of improvements makes the gameplay much more seamless and lowers the barrier to …
Inquiring minds yearn to know: “How do you manage to manage all those ideas and projects?” And I say to them: “Well, inquiring minds, yearn no further. The answers are thither. Or do I mean yon? I don’t think thither means what I think it means. Onward to me asking …
Alt Title: How Not To Make a Ton of Money Blogging About Things That Matter to You Why Do I Write? I mostly write for selfish reasons. I started blogging because I thought passive income would be great, but then after a while I realized it’s probably the wrong niche, …
Welcome to the first of a multi-part series of tutorials on how to develop, source control, and run scripts to control your Android device, using only mobile apps for development. Dev On the Go I recently went on a road trip, and wanted to experiment with a mobile-only workflow. The …
Earlier today, I thought: “Man, Terraria sure is a great game. I should make a clone.” Then later today, I thought: “Wait, somebody probably already did that.” And, lo! An open source Terraria clone: Terrarium! But man, I have to install so many dependencies. This kind of thing is a …
I find myself in a barren landscape, with a strange fellow staring at me. I guess I’ll… build a house? Deforestation, Pillaging, and Explosives! Your First Day Target Items wood wooden sword slime torches rope workbench wood walls wood doors Extra Items mushrooms sand clay stone (20) furnace cobweb (20) …
My Origin Story I started my career as a student. Spoiler: I’m still a student. I didn’t know what I wanted. OK, I knew I wanted to just play games, eat pizza, and drink mountain dew all day. But none of that was going to get me anywhere except diabetic. …
Table of Contents Required Packages Installing WordPress Setting Up the Database Setting Up NGINX (Your Traffic Controller) Nginx basic file architecture Install and Test NGINX Modifying the Default Site Settings Mapping Your WordPress Install to Your NGINX Server Troubleshooting: PHP Processing Errors Troubleshooting: Possible Missing Packages Setting Up DNS (Domain …
I love my productivity apps. I like to experience all the things. There’s a lot of redundancy, and not much automated information flow, but I’ve developed a system that helps me internalize where a particular type of information is stored, so I can find it when I need it. The …
We’ve migrated to DigitalOcean! (Various reasons, more on that later.) The process was straightforward, for the most part. The few snags were relatively easy to resolve (the main one was figuring out how to change the default DigitalOcean WordPress install to use the migrated tables). Create a DigitalOcean Droplet Use …
I’ve been checking Node.js out lately, and thought I’d share a quick Hello World using the Jade templating engine. Get Node set up From your terminal: cd /tmp wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v6.9.2/node-v6.9.2-linux-x64.tar.gz tar xvfz node-v6.9.2-linux-x64.tar.gz mkdir -p /usr/local/nodejs mv node-v6.9.2-linux-x64/* /usr/local/nodejs Then add this to your ~/.bashrc: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/nodejs/bin Don’t forget to …
I wanted to get my hands dirty while making something fun. I LOVE text adventure RPGs, and I LOVE MUDs, so I’m attempting to build a cross between the two: a Single User Dungeon (SUD). A few notes on code quality Most of this code is pretty rough. I was …
I wanted to host my Django apps on Bluehost, but there was no out of the box solution that I could find. I pieced together a temporary solution using an older release of Django from various sources. Check out my other Django guides! Hosting Your Django App on Heroku Django, …
Here’s something I found in my archives. If it sounds and looks like a school project report, that’s because it is! I was taking a networking class circa Spring 2013 that covered Linux, telnet, ssh, and other networking tools. In this report, I covered down on SSH, SCP, and WebDav. …
Heroku is a fantastic service that lets you get your app on the web quickly, for free (with the base model). If you followed my previous post Django, A Framework for Python Web Apps, then you already have most of the tools you need to publish your work on the …
In Django Hello World! we verified the Python installation, got Django installed, and output ‘Hello World!’ from the Python shell. Next up: running a Django web page on a local server! Primary Django Web Page Components urls.py views.py models.py template.html settings.py URLs and Views At a minimum, we need to …
This tutorial is intended as a quick setup guide, designed to get you started as quickly as possible. I’ve found the best way to learn is to jump in and get your hands dirty. Then when you read the documentation, there’s context behind it, and it sticks a little better. …
