Mostly Dev Stuff

Schoolyard Sim Update (d0cc8cb)

Since the last update (02da14e), I added a new display for children. They appear as faces whose emotions reflect their morale value. They also have little life bars to their right, which display their current health. 

They also go towards the attraction they are using, and only board the attraction once they are close to it.

Next, I plan to work on some sort of interaction between children, like if there are too many children with low morale close together, they get into a fight.

Here's another video that throws more children into the simulation: http://youtu.be/9v0HTV1mKmM.

This is a WIP dodgeball-style game. It's not playable yet. The most recent thing I completed was having the player on the left throw the ball and have the other player automatically catch it if he collides with it.

On the technical side, I've been writing this game in Ecmascript 6 using the 6to5 transpiler now known as Babel. I've also transitioned to using gulp as a build system instead of grunt, with limited impact.

Links

Schoolyard Sim (02da14e)

Schoolyard Sim is another entry I’m working on for onegameamonth. It’s supposed to be something approaching Theme Hospital for school playgrounds the longer I work on it. This commit (02da14e) completes a set of commits that make it usable (but I wouldn’t say playable). Pretty much the only thing that you can do right now is to click on the grid to place attractions. Placing those attractions will affect 3-canned kids that are already added to the simulation. You can see their stats at the top right.

As the simulation progresses, the kids choose an attraction to enter at random, stay there for some duration as defined by the type of attraction, and then exit. Their stats such as health and morale are effected by using an attraction and by not being able to use one (because there are none available).

Some of the next features I'll be implementing include:

Additional influencing metrics such as the safety of attractions

A nicer display of children (so you see them on screen as sprites)

Interactions between children

Here are some links:

Source code

This update adds a new logo for the game, and improved visuals, including a more coherent theme, new animations between levels, and fixes a few bugs.

The grid size is also reduced to make the game "less overwhelming" :)

Demo: http://blog.jamie.ly/poker-match/ Source: https://github.com/jamiely/poker-match/tree/v2.1.0

This version of the app actually adds some game elements, creating two different game modes: "Endless" and "Score Attack". Endless matches the previous style of play but adds a score display. Score Attack consists of (currently) 3 levels with objectives to meet a certain score that increases with each level.

From a technical perspective, this release adds a number of things including score display, some UI elements such as buttons, game modes, levels, and a level manager to tie them together.

On the build side, a new grunt task using grunt-usemin handles the messy work of concatenating and revisioning files--important for cache-busting. I enjoyed this mostly because I never setup usemin myself in angular projects and didn't know exactly how it worked.

I'm halfway through the month and although it's kind of a game now, it lacks a lot of polish. Of all the ideas for games that I had, this one is the easiest, which means I probably won't be able to complete #onegameamonth to the letter. Indeed, with my other obligations, I'll be lucky if I can complete one game every two months.

The match-3 style matching didn't seem to work that well for Poker Match, so I wanted to change it to a drag-to-match style of games like Puzzle Craft.

One of the added benefits this provides is I don't have to implement chained matches (matches that occur as a result of falling pieces). I can also implement additional match types that have not yet been implemented (since they were not really practical using the old system) such as full house and two pair.

You can play the game here: http://blog.jamie.ly/poker-match/

This is version 1 of Poker Match, a match game using poker-style hands as match types: http://blog.jamie.ly/poker-match/. The source is at: https://github.com/jamiely/poker-match/. The specific source for this tag: https://github.com/jamiely/poker-match/tree/v1.0.0.

I'm thinking about participating in http://onegameamonth.com, but I'm not decided yet--this would be the first entry.

Here are some notes about the first version:

After playing this game awhile using the current interaction mechanism, which is similar to the one that Bejewled uses, which swaps the positions of two adjacent pieces (it's actually closer to Tetris Attack where the pieces stay switched), it seems like it's preferable to use the Boggle system of matching, which requires the player to draw a line across the pieces that match.

I'm at odds over whether to implement this type of matching first or to improve the piece dropping logic, which fills in the board from the top down. Having that kind of logic would allow me to start with a board that doesn't have any existing matches, and also allow me to clear matches proactively as they occur using new dropped pieces.

David Schnepper's Ignite talk, "Isn't That Code Dead?" - Velocity Santa Clara 2014

Dead-Simple Dependency Injection

Rúnar Óli Bjarnason, senior software engineer at Capital IQ and Scalaz library contributor, discusses dependency injection in Scala at the 2012 Northeast Scala Symposium.

React and Flux: Building Applications with a Unidirectional Data Flow

Mary live-codes a JavaScript game from scratch – Mary Rose Cook at Front-Trends 2014

The goal of the competition was to develop games in under 13k of JavaScript. The winner is a reverse lemmings game called Pest Control Weasels. The game demonstrates AI, audio, and collision detection in under 13k, incredible!

[SGDQ 2014] Final Fantasy 6 (SKETCH Glitch) by Brossentia

Total Moving Face Reconstruction ECCV 2014

Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014

David Nolen - Immutability, interactivity & JavaScript (FutureJS 2014)

This is a talk from Barcelona FutureJS 2014 (http://futurejs.org). Surprisingly the high performance mutation available in modern JavaScript engines is a gre...