Saving some frames by throwing a canvas at drawImage()

My next project is to be a maze game. I’d already ditched the idea of recreating a Gauntlet style romp through multiple dungeons because I wasn’t happy with the behaviour of the monsters. Getting stuck on walls and bunching up to block an open doorway was driving me mad. That’s when I started HyperGunner. Two [...]

X Company – old game idea in new clothes

I’ve always wanted to create a game for a mobile device that effectively goes to work when you stop playing. Initially I had the idea of a sort of Tamagochi approach. Fairly predictable. But the more I played with the idea in my mind the more I came back to something a bit more adventurous. [...]

In search of fun and thrills

I’m currently playing my Spy Hunter-esque game to death trying to figure out where the real fun of such a game lies. Perhaps unsurprisingly I’m happiest when the car is full tilt and narrowly dodging obstacles and other vehicles. Initially I had the road set quite narrow. Naturally when the game became unplayable I switched [...]

Some brief insight in to my new HTML5 game Spy Chase

Development on my “Spy Hunter” game is progressing at a rapid rate. I actually call the game Spy Chase and the player adopts the role of law enforcement on the hunt for foreign spies. It’s a high speed chase through several different environments and even includes a night section where the car’s headlights come on [...]

HyperGunner – collision detection improvements

Something that I should have paid more attention to with the development of HyperGunner was the collision between the player’s starship and the alien’s bombs. During the more intense battles it’s not uncommon to see the player trapped within a mess of bombs with very little room to move. The problem was that the collision [...]

HyperGunner – level / wave design theory

HyperGunner is turning in to something to be proud of. I’m very excited to be developing it just now and am thoroughly enjoying assembling different game elements – scoring multipliers, power-ups, hyperspace bonus phase etc. What I’m most thrilled about is the pace of the action. When I first started assembling the game code based [...]

New game – old game: HyperGunner

I’ve been very busy this last few days turning Wizard Wars in to a vertical scrolling shooter. It was very easy. Some things cropped up en route that I thought were worth a mention. When I designed Wizard Wars I made sure that the pipeline was simple. That is, I define the images and animation [...]

How Galaxians changed my life

Something I always wanted to write up but never really worked out the right approach for was how and why I became interested in making these simple / crude / amateurish JavaScript based games. To get the full picture we have to go back to some time around 1980 / 81. As a young boy [...]

Lesson #1 – Frame rate / canvas / HTML5 and iPhone

Writing a simple arcade game for a handheld device (and even then to be executed through a web browser) is quite different from the luxury of writing for the desktop. Not only do you have to consider the scale and colour of everything but you have to be careful with just how much you throw [...]

A rethink on the level design / goals of “Castle Adventure 2″

I took a time-out to explore some game design ideas. To start with I needed to write down what I had come up with so far with my game. I then mapped that on top of what I originally set out to create. The results were interesting. So far I have created the following game [...]