Projects

Yep This is the 6th iteration of this idea. I finally realized the term for type of game I’ve been failing to finish over and over is ‘Colony Sim’. I have loved these games since I was a kid, but didn’t really experience many until the last few years. I spent hours and hours playing SimAnt, but that was about it. Later, I played Age of Empires and Empire Earth, but really only enjoyed them for their colony management features, which are limited because the core of the gameplay was RTS combat, which I was not very keen on....

What I’ve been working on: (project management) compiling a list of past projects and their statuses (currently 31 projects, some very rough POC, some actually useful) (site) converting landing page to hugo-generated site (site) playing with asciinema for use in site demos (previous approach was screen recordings uploaded to youtube, then embedded youtube videos in the content page) (site) enhancing my digitalocean droplet management tooling (terraform/ansible) (dev) hacking a markov chain generator in python (dev) exploring python’s argparse and developing API-wrapper CLI tools (game dev) developing a text-based tactics RPG using python, with libraries such as blessings, pyinquirer, etc....

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 bugs) that I plan to continue to work on. Resource Quest in Unity is nearly feature complete, and needs polish, but you can view the source code from the link on my portfolio....

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 feature! And here’s the finished leaderboard implementation

Step 1: Bask in the glory

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: 1 this.spider.initialInterval = supporting.getRandom(this.spider.interval.min, this.spider.interval.max); But knobsAndLevers.init() fails, because supporting is not available: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 $ node_modules/....

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 Capturing browser with Karma 1 npm install karma karma-coverage My config: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 module....

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 canvas-libs for both Centipede and Robotron Commits Centipede 6fbcfff e5fab76 2155216 Robotron 4c0c571 58f992f Canvas Libs...

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 as the X-input (they should be; the indices don’t change between D- and X-input, only the dPad location does, and X-input includes a few extra buttons....

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: 1 2 3 var theControls = controls; Then add stuff to controls like this: 1 2 3 theControls.aNewThing = newStuff; Or override stuff like this:...