So I managed to finish a game this time! It’s available at http://goo.gl/4qI3O  it’s HTML5 and requires a keyboard. Works completely in Chrome, in other browsers some or all of the sounds fail to play. If it had a tablet or other device to test with I probably could add touch controls (I think it might work quite well with the game actually), but I don’t fancy trying to do it blind. So no touch controls, sorry!

On seeing the topic my first thought was, “oh what the f***”. My second thought was “Oh well this is a good excuse not use any art or music”. My third thought was “Actually might be a fun design challenge”, minimalism suggests to me, no UI, evident gameplay, no scores, no complex abilities.

I’m reasonably happy with it and I enjoyed working in JavaScript again (although any attempt proper OO broke down after a few hours), I think the most important change from last time I attempted it was the media blackout, mostly because other people are more skilled at this that me… especially in the art and music departments, best to ignore that whilst you’re working.

I think next time I try to make a HTML5 game I’m going to use WebGL even if it’s 2D because I would have liked to do some post-processing effects to pretty it up. Also when playing with higher top speeds for the circles it turns out even a reasonably low speed has a lot juddering.

This time I used howler.js for sound because it provides fall back for non-web audio api browsers… but given that the sounds only kind of work on those browers, I think I’ll just use the web audio API myself in future.

My final thought is, I had to make myself do a steering behaviours project a couple of months ago and I kind of thought to myself at the time, “this is a waste of time”… however this game’s AI is pretty much exclusively steering behaviours. So that’s good encouragement to continue to do ‘learning’ projects as well as actual game projects.

So, yay finished a Ludum Dare, it was fun. If you try my game I hope you enjoy it.