Front matter

I've updated the splash screen (which you'd only have seen if you had been playing the Android builds up until now). I've also added a main menu, a title screen, a credits screen, and going in and out of the game. Nothing exciting, but the sort of thing that makes a game feel like a package.

I struggled with getting the buttons working right on all three of the platforms at the same time: desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app, but I think they're working now.

I think there's some bug in the way I'm loading my splashscreen - the first time I load the game, it fails, but eventually it gets loaded and is cached. If you try to play the game, and just get a blank screen, hit F5 a few times. Sorry.

Maybe I'll get to fixing this today or tomorrow. If not, it's hitting the features I wanted to get done for the month.

http://bigdicegames.com/RatMaze/maze.html

Things that don't make for good screenshots

I spent some time tinkering with the game camera, and got two pieces pretty much working: dragging and pinch/zoom.

The dragging is accomplished by taking long clicks (longer than half a second) and applying the offset from the mouse(touch) down event to the current mouse(touch) position. That's pretty good, but then I have some special case code to get rid of that offset through interpolation, and it's pretty similar to the camera movement code I have in the other branch, which focuses on a hex. Similar, but completely separate. Code redundancy is nice, if I expect one path of the code to be eaten by gamma rays, not so good if I want to maintain it.

The pinch/zoom code is relatively simple: when I detect two simultaneous touches, I capture the distance between them. As the touches update, I compare the new distance to the old distance, and scale appropriately. There's a bunch more fiddliness, and it turns out that I end up snapping the camera position back to where the character is standing, which is probably not the best solution, but it's a solution.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll put in the main menu screen. Cause I can't have a credits screen if I don't have a menu screen.

Maybe I'll update the character movement so he hops instead of blinks.

Mobile progress

I only have a little more time to go on this one, and I haven't been putting in a bunch of time lately. However, I have sorted out some issues with handling touch events that had been keeping the game from working on mobile.

I also learned a bit about remote debugging: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/remote-debugging which proved valuable - breakpoints and data inspection are handy.

I also figured out that by passing "script" to the Closure "calcdeps.py" script, instead of "compiled", you get one big uncompiled file, suitable for debugging. I also saw that there's some hints of a source map, but I haven't dug in to that yet.

As the above screenshot evidences, you can use a single touch and move around, as if you were using a mouse to click. I really want dragging for both desktop and mobile to work, and pinch-zooming on mobile. Maybe that'll be easy, given the things I've built, the things I've learned.

There ought to be sound, there ought to be a title screen. Other than that, this is just about done.

A maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Not a game yet, just an experiment - I intend September (and October?) to be small-game months. We'll see how that works out.

I would like my small September game to run natively and enjoyably on Android. I would also like to see it feel native and enjoyable on the web. Again, we'll see.

Shall We Play a Game?

The only correct answer is "Love to". And you get bonus points if your voice was in the weird high-pitched scratchy tone from the movie.

Back in 1983, I saw a little movie about a nerdy guy named David L. who lived in the Seattle area and liked computer games.

The cast includes Dabney Coleman and Ally Sheedy, of course. John Spencer and Michael Madsen are credited, and IMDb says that William H. Macy has an uncredited role as a NORAD officer.

And it introduced me to Matthew Broderick, who went on to memorable roles in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, Project X (opposite Helen Hunt), Godzilla, and The Producers.


Tonight, as part of their "The End of the World as We Know It" (nice) series, SIFF is showing WarGames. It'll be good to see it again on a big screen, and presumably with other film/game/computer geeks.


All right, so maybe you're not able to make it to Seattle tonight, but you still want some voice synthesized game experience, and match three is your speed. You could check out WarGames: WOPR for Android - a game I didn't expect to like, but I found myself sticking with through the end. You play in the role of WOPR, which gives the various characters in the game chances to play against you, providing a little variety in opponents. Additionally, there are two different sets of pieces and several active and passive powerups that you can buy and upgrade, so the game changes as you go along, rewarding you for continued play, even if you're stuck on a single level.


I haven't yet seen WarGames: The Dead Code and I don't think War Games: At the End of the Day is at all connected. Somewhat tantalizingly, IMDb says that there's a 2014 WarGames movie - there's no real information on IMDb, but if you do a Google search, the snippet for the IMDb page lists Seth Gordon as the director. Curious.

Note to myself: I should try to see WG:TDC soon (this weekend? Over Christmas vacation?).

Note to the reader: if you like geeking out to this kind of '80s nostalgia, and you haven't read Ready Player One yet, you owe it to yourself. Fast reading. Sort of like if "Ender's Game" was written by Neal Stephenson. Or if "Reamde" was... well, it's a lot like "Reamde".

None of these links are paid. So click away!