Off The Planet Games

Networked Media Production - Metapost

Thu, 10 May 2012 21:31:16 +1000

SpaceShooter Theme

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:31:24 +1000

It’s been a week or so since I submitted the theme and it is still in review. I’m not sure how long they usually take to approve but it looks like I can share the link anyway. So check out the Space Shooter Theme.

I’ve tried to make the theme as easy as possible to customise. You can pretty much replace anything in the game from the text, sprites, background and keyboard control characters. You also don’t have to go near any html, css or javascript. Just use the customise screen to make all your changes. The sprites are only 16x16 so are pretty limited but the idea was to make the game really simple, sort of like a game and watch. Well, I’m pretty sure the idea came from a slide in a lecture that had a game and watch in it.

The rest of the theme has parallax scrolling backgrounds (2 layers and it looks good when you use scroll to top), tag clouds, social links, auto pager and scroll to top. It does have a conflict between the social icons and auto pager so don’t use them at the same time. Otherwise they all seem to work pretty well. If it doesn’t you get your money back :) but drop me a comment and I’ll get it fixed.

If you end up grabbing a copy and creating your own little shooter game send me a link. I’d love to see what you can do since, as you can tell, graphics aren’t my strongest gift.

multiplayer considerations

Tue, 01 May 2012 22:49:14 +1000

I found a few good articles while working out how to program multiplayer games.

Greg Fielder has a nice simple summary here
Valve has some good resources such as Client/Server Game Protocol Design. It’s an older article but provides some good background to design considerations. Also Source Multiplayer Networking has some good information about lag compensation.
Mark Terrano and Paul Bettner have an interesting article @Gamesutra about Age of Empires and networking considerations when you have 1500 Archers.

These are mostly older articles and I’m sure things have moved on since 2001. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 28.8k modem. However, latency and the unpredictable nature of the Internet will still be an issue. If anybody has any newer article links drop a line in the comments.

I’ve also been looking into match making. It wouldn’t be much good if people can’t get together and play. Interestingly, it seems that match making for HTML games seem pretty non-existent. It could be that everybody is just using Facebook or Google. Steam and a few others have match making services but they are targeted at PC and/or mobile apps not pure play HTML. I’ll keep looking at the options. Again if you have a good suggestion shout out in the comments.

gregbabula: Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:31:47 +1000

gregbabula:

Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector

A very in-depth look at the webkit inspector, a must read.

Nice article on the inspector built into Safari and Chrome…wish I’d seen this earlier :)

IE8...mmmm

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:24:00 +1000

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve just fired up the blog on ie8 and the game is a bit busted. I wasn’t planning on supporting <ie9 (i actually haven’t tested ie9 yet either, I should do that :) ) but if I can easily fix it I will or I should at least put up a message.

Works fine on chrome and firefox (windows, mac) and on Safari (mac).

Submitted!

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:58:16 +1000

SpaceShooter the theme has just been submitted!!!! Now to wait and see if I got it right.

It took longer than I thought. You know the old 80/20 saying. Basically 80% was working pretty much off the bat but the last 20% was a killer. Mostly the problems are with alignment and conflicting addons such as addThis. After much teeth nashing and swearing, I find that it doesn’t play nicely with my tag cloud. So I ditched addThis since I figured it would be easy enough to add FB, Twitter and G+ myself.

Now for some multiplayer research :)

Mobile Game Primer

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:41:40 +1000

Mobile Game Primer:

A really good article. Compares canvas vs css in mobile platforms.

whatishtml5: Gaming in the browser is making big leaps thanks...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:56:11 +1000

whatishtml5:

Gaming in the browser is making big leaps thanks to HTML5. Here’s a list of 15 gaming engines which are leveraging HTML5 to bring sophisticated graphics and interaction to the browser.

A good summary

laughingsquid: MIT Hack Turns Building Into a Giant Playable...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:27:48 +1000

laughingsquid:

MIT Hack Turns Building Into a Giant Playable Game of Tetris

nice one!

!!c1QfXUgcGY0: Never appeal to my ego this obviously, or else I'll spew 500 words of text at you too

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:14:27 +1000

!!c1QfXUgcGY0: Never appeal to my ego this obviously, or else I'll spew 500 words of text at you too:

c1qfxugcgy0:

Thanks!

1.) I’m not actually— wait, hold up, I’m tired of starting shit with numbers.

A.) I’m not actually all that expert. There are significant, crippling gaps in my knowledge. (DOM manipulation? The precedence rules of the CSS cascade?? Anything involving forms???) I shim around these…

flagybutonecomics: “They do exist”So this comic is all about...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:55:39 +1000

flagybutonecomics:

“They do exist”

So this comic is all about the introduction of the 4th character. Yes, she is a girl and Yes, she is a gamer - They do exist; though the guys have a bit of a hard time believing it.

I know its common place these days, but keep in mind the guys live in a weird white void.

Also, for the observant among you, you may have noticed that I uploaded this on a Thursday and not a Wednesday night. Well, I ran out of time last night so I did it this morning. Basically, from here on out we’ll just make the new uploads every Wednesday or Thursday (both if its a good week).

-Flagy

Games Industry International

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:47:33 +1000

Games Industry International:

Latest industry buzz

"Travian was successful using static web pages and Farmville ploughed an entirely new furrow using..."

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:45:31 +1000

“Travian was successful using static web pages and Farmville ploughed an entirely new furrow using Flash. But there is now a growing acceptance that HTML5 will be a major platform for games in the future”

- James Austin (CEO Turbulenz)

Ooops

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:28:00 +1000

Looks like photo sets aren’t working in the theme, aarrrgh. I’ve had a look but can’t find the problem yet. Oh well good way to learn css and probably another reason I should have started from scratch instead of basing this theme off an already existing one.

it8bit: Wooden Wall Art Created by Sanchezz Check out these and...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:11:59 +1000

it8bit:

Wooden Wall Art

Created by Sanchezz

Check out these and more in his shop!

Pacman and space invaders…the memories!

Theme update

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 02:24:00 +1000

Well it has been a while…

I’ve spent the past few days stripping bits out the theme and adding bits back in. It is mostly back together again, after been pretty busted today..but it is still missing some nice social media buttons and the following people list is not quite how I want it.

I’ve spent quite a bit of the time adding in customisations. I’ve decided to try and put the theme up on tumblr for others to use. Mostly to give the game away and the parallax scrolling. So i’ve added a bunch of switches to turn bits on and off, like the game for example. I’ve also added the game images, fonts and colours to the list of customisations so you don’t have to go to the code to modify the game. You can also modify the keys that control the player.

As for the game it’s easy to customise. Player, aliens and bullet are all 16x16 pixel boxes. So you can make up your own graphics. The rocket ship is also easily replaceable and needs to be at least as wide as the game which 192px but no wider than 250px since this is the width of the left sidebar. The game is about 206px high. At the moment I just use a green background for the game play area but I’ve made it possible to add a background image through the customisations as well. I’ll try and get around to making a second version using different graphics to see how easy it is.

Infinite scrolling is now an option and I’ve exposed the parallax images so you can replace the stars with something different. Colours of course can be changed for most things and the metal background images in the central column can be turned on, off or replaced with your own.

I’ll work on the other media icons tomorrow and should have it ready for tumblr in a day or so. Actually, I’m not really sure how that process works yet so it might take a while. Something else to post later :)

Theme progress

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:44:22 +1000

Finally a bit of progress on the theme. This is the .9 release as there is still some work with the Disqus settings to iron out and fix the social network buttons. Oh and then fix the rocket by making it look more…rockety :)

But the game still works and the parallax scrolling is working as well.

Once that is done I will put code into static tumblr elements so I can get them out of my dropbox and maybe even think about publishing the theme….maybe.

Psych assignment due on Friday so after that it is back to working on the pacman game. First stop will be firing up my ec2 instance and playing around with node.js and websockets to get some multiplayer action happening.

it8bit: Atari National PAC-MAN Day On April 3rd, 1982, ATARI...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:48:36 +1000

it8bit:

Atari National PAC-MAN Day

On April 3rd, 1982, ATARI will officially introduce the only home version of PAC-MAN. And a nation will celebrate.

[Image via]

Ahh pacman

it8bit: The Art of Video Games 2012 Photo by Blake Patterson

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:23:57 +1100

it8bit:

The Art of Video Games 2012

Photo by Blake Patterson

Vertical parallax scrolling

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:47:27 +1100

I’ve been wanting to trick out my theme for a while but haven’t been able to come up with the concept until now.

It came to me while I was reading about gaming and one of the early techniques to make things look 3D was to use a something known as parallax scrolling. It basically works by layering the background images, and possibly a front image. With each layer separated and everything apart from the background using transparency we get a nice composite picture, kind of like those books of the body with the transparent overlays. The beauty is that when you move across the screen each of the layers moves at a different rate and gives the screen some depth.

If you do a google search you will find quite a few examples, although a lot of the commercial ones have moved on and changed their pages so they are no longer available. Still, here are couple below that are pretty interesting.

Silverback : Resize the screen horizontally to see it.

Mark Lawrence : Interesting vertical scroll

Dromaeo : Cute dinosaur header, resize horizontally to see.

Row to the Pole : Another vertical scroll

Since the mini game is a space invaders clone I figured the best theme might be a little starry background and a rocket ship to finish off. Add a little vertical parallax code from Ben Taylor and see how it goes. Check out my about page for the sample.

Now that I have it working on a simple page I’ve started to pull apart the template structure of tumblr. So watch out for that over the next week as I try to create it as a theme for the blog.