Bursting with Style

Some time ago (3 years as of Jan 2016) as a college project I made a game called BotShot. It’s a very basic arcade-style top-down shooter. It was built on Microsoft’s now abandoned XNA framework for C#, which means it only runs on windows, yet it has no guarantee of working on newer iterations of Windows.

As a personal project, I have decided to redo the game to ensure its longetivity and to pad my portfolio. For this, I've had to make some decisions and pour probably more work into this than I should.

(concept image for the reworked game)

Why not port it to MonoGame?

Monogame is an open-source, cross-platform version of XNA created with the intent of porting XNA games, and now aims to maintain the community around the original framework.

Well, my experience with Monogame is limited, but when I last used it- it felt very fragmented and unorganized. Pieces were borrowed from XNA, some systems were still OS-dependent, the content system was a Frankenstein monster at best, and it required that XNA be installed to develop with at the time, locking you to OS versions prior to windows 8- which seems to not be the case anymore.

Beyond my personal poor experiences with the framework, which have VERY likely been resolved by now, I’m remaking BotShot primarily as a portfolio piece. With this in mind, I believe that a web-based approach works best because I can embed it directly into my portfolio site, giving potential employers a chance to check out my work without requiring any effort on their part (aside from keeping their browser up-to-date).

What are my choices?

I’m not a fan of either Flash or Java, Java’s plugin protocol has been blocked in Chrome, and flash has a reputation of being the non-techy’s choice for projects (not ideal for garnering the attention of high-profile tech employers) and its plugin protocol is also on the chopping block for security reasons. Unity3D would look great to Unity game companies, but it ouputs either a plugin (see above) or a very poor HTML5 port and my experience with it is poor as well. That leaves me with my personal favorites: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I’m not being sarcastic, those were my first programming languages so I am incredibly biased towards them.

Specifically the HTML5 canvas, JavaScript, and PixiJS for 2D WebGL rendering.

What Does BotShot Prove?

BotShot implements many basic and advanced concepts. It has a simple custom physics system to deal with collisions, implements a flocking algorithm, particle effects (additive overlays and fluid particles), shows off user-interface design, game-state management, high-scores, asset management, sprite-sheet animations, shader programming, etc...

And now it shows my ability to work iteratively off of user-feedback, as well as my capability to master multiple development environments and programming languages.

The only important factor it lacks is that it doesn’t involve any sort of team effort, which I hope to fix in the next project that I partake in.

Going Forward

BotShot is such a simple concept that the remake is almost finished. It’s definitely more of a remaster than a port, because I am reworking the art, design, and some of the algorithms (collisions are much better now, as is flocking. It feels way more natural). And even after I get a /playable/ version, I still hope to update it periodically with new playable characters, weapons, enemies, environments, and power-ups. Maybe a new play mode or two!

After this project, I hope to meet some people and work on a collective project. Perhaps join on a project of one of my friends! Something fun, hopefully, and realizable in concept.

I’m also working on some C++ libraries still, which will preferably be ready for the public soon! I’ll try my best not to vague-blog about them.

"dude where's the eye drops!?"