With LD27 starting in just two days, I thought I’d make another post with some updates on what tools I’ll be using and the state of my game Engine, LynxJS. LynxJS is still in early development but I’ve added quite a bit of functionality and tests over the past few days.

Check out all of that below the cut!

With Lynx, I’ve added the first collision factory, which is responsible for all aspects of collisions. I still need to rework it a bit as there are some instances where it’s buggy, but overall I feel this is the best collision class I’ve personally written. I’m using a quadtree implementation to minimize collision checks and at the moment, the game engine can handle up to 1000 moving, colliding game objects on a two year old macbook pro.

I’ve also updated the asset manager to support audio and video, as well as preload images. At the moment, the asset manager does not support any other assets but that may change before the compo begins.

In addition, I’ve updated the IO class to better handle keyboard events and allow multiple events per key press. You can use these for each scene or for every scene as needed.

Lastly, I’ve been working on adding support for more advanced developer tools, displaying graphs for framerate, objects, collisions and render time.

You can view the tests at the pages below:

• Test 1 – Rendering without collisions
• Test 2 -Asset management test
• Test 3 – Collision and Input test with arrow keys (this is where I’m finding bugs)
• Test 4 – Stress Test, new developer tools (spawns 1px squares until the framerate drops below 50 fps.)

As with any post about Lynx, I’d like to stress that this probably isn’t going to be a game engine you’ll want to use for the compo quite yet, especially considering I haven’t even thought about adding support for IE (I can’t stand it. I’ll get to it though, I promise). We’ll see what happens in the compo and I’ll be updating the engine continuously throughout and after LD27.

With that out of the way, here’s the tools I’ll be using:

Code

• LynxJS as my Game Engine (html5)
• SublimeText3 as my text editor
• Smaller App for “compiling” and minifying my code

Graphics

• Adobe Cloud (primarily photoshop cs6)
• Pixen for base pixel art

Audio

I haven’t finalized my decision yet as most of my work in audio is done splicing tracks together at local shows, so I don’t have as much experience with creating content. However, I do have a license for Ableton Live that came with my Novation Launchpad and I have done some work in that. That will probably be the program I use to create my background music.

Any voiceovers (if required) will be done by myself, my roommate, or a friend of mine at the time of the competition.

I’m still a bit nervous since this is my first LD compo, but I’m excited to see how I do and what I learn. Good luck to everyone and thanks for reading!