Entry Here, Game Here (source currently available by viewing source and grabbing the js and css files.)

This time I tried to write a very simple game after failing with multi-bodied collision response and pixel-perfect collision detection in LD15.

Evil Lair Command is a variation on Missile Command where you defend your volcanic island lair from the likes of 007. Ripe for lots of humor that never made it in (see below).

I decided I really wanted to try HTML5’s Canvas despite having never worked in it before and not touching  javascript since 2007. I prepped myself for this challenge by blitting an image to a Canvas on Thursday.  The biggest hurdle (for me) was the fact that an image doesn’t load immediately upon setting its source. I was rewriting the image handling code up to about 15 minutes before the deadline because the old code was crashing when I added boat spawning. There’s still a lot of bad code leftover from the old image handling methods, like the initGameState which is now a NOP (thankfully it doesn’t crash anything and just silently moves on to the next state).

I also lost a lot of time yesterday when I got sick. I ended up sleeping several hours in the afternoon and when I was working I wasn’t concentrating that well.

Stuff that was planned but didn’t make it in:

• Water texture that I spent more than 3 minutes creating.
• Laser graphics.
• Explosions.
• Minions (lives). Each time a boat hits the island a named minion would be lost protecting the island from a named government agent.
• Increasing difficulty as time progresses instead of just throwing a mass of boats at you in the beginning and spawning a new boat at a more-or-less constant rate (it’s a constant rate that’s perturbed by a random variation).
• Sound effects (including Evil cackles).
• Game restart that’s not triggered by clicking. Because it’s annoying to be trying to click on a boat just before it “reaches” the island, only to find you’ve started a new game.

Oh well, I have all the time in the world to add those features now. =p If I do, I’ll probably post a link to it from the Game Site, leaving the LD17 entry where it’s at for judging.

– Micah