I have been working the whole afternoon/evening today optimizing the speed of my platformer. The button animation was damn slow because I was basically blitting the whole canvas several times during each frame. It’s been quite a lot of work that unfortunately doesn’t show visually, but now the animation is quick enough for my taste. I even tested the game in my eeepc and it works just fine. With the new code I am precalculating some data and caching it, in order to reduce the amount of drawing/updating during animation. This precomputation is quite heavy, but I am hiding it by using a function that works on the background while the user is playing. Almost no slowdown noticed.
I also took a couple hours break in the middle of it or my head would explode.
Anyway, even though this is less than a sketch of a game, I’m happy with what I’ve done so far. I have a basic engine for a platformer that runs on Html5/canvas, and I think I’ve learned a lot about this technology in the process. Moreover, I have some codebase I might want to reuse in the future. I don’t have much time tomorrow to dedicate to this project, which means that my participation in LD19 ends here. There’s still stuff to do with this game. I didn’t even start considering sound, which should not be a big problem (or am I too optimistic?). I plan to keep on working on this project in the coming days, during the Christmas holidays. One missing feature I’d like to implement now is multiple levels. Right now there is one single level, there is no “welcome screen” and not even a victory condition that marks the end of the game. But more important than that, I’d like to expand the code so more levels can be added. Finally, the big elephant in the room is the total lack of content. I’ve been so concentrated writing code that I didn’t bother to design a proper level 1. But that’s (supposedly) the easy part, if I did everything right I should be able to just start designing the level and buttons and doors with just Gimp.
Oh, and I need to decide a title for the game and maybe change the name of the project (if github lets me do so, which is something I still have to look up).
The current prototype lives at http://chrisjan00.github.com/ld19platformer/
Take care,
Chrisjan
P.S. Don’t forget to try GunFu Deadlands, if you haven’t already. Works on Mac, Windows and Linux (but you need a mouse with a right button).
