Name: Pew Pew
Genre: Shoot-em-up
Engine: HTML5 Canvas
Source on Github

I only decided to take part in 1GAM in the middle of January, so had only about a week or so to make my first entry (getting my excuses in early!). I've built a couple of simple games (Pong, Noughts and Crosses) using HTML5 canvas, so this seemed like a good place to start - learning a new game engine or framework well enough would have taken me past the end of the month.

I decided on a shoot-em-up game mainly because I haven't made one before, and it involves a fair number of things used in a lot of games:

  • simple AI (enemies)
  • player input (for controls)
  • collision detection
  • powerups!
  • sprites/art (my previous games only used basic shapes rather than any artwork)

What went right

The main thing I got right: I finished in time! In fact, I finished a day early, and spent it tarting up the webpage for the game. I also amanaged to add most aspects I planned for (despite massive cuts to get it finished in time) - enemies, powerups and a final boss were the key elements I wanted to add.

What went wrong

I decided to write the game from scratch, which turned out to be a huge mistake. I felt that using a framework or game engine would somehow be cheating (which seems to be quite a common feeling), but it meant that I had a huge amount of work to do in a very short space of time, even though my game was very small. The only reason I was able to finish was by using (read: nicking) code from tutorials to handle sprites and sounds. Lesson learned: always use a game engine! (unless you have a really really good reason)

This was my first entry into a time-limited contest, so my initial game turned out to be vastly too ambitious to finish. Originally I had planned on several enemies, different powerups, mutiple waves of enemies and an end boss. The finished game has a shield powerup, one wave of one type of enemy and a boss - basically everything trimmed back as far as possible. I think I lost quite a chunk of time towards the start of the project by trying to make everything in the code reusable - i.e. an Enemy object which could be extended for use in multiple enemy types (and the same for bosses and powerups). I soon realised that this was slowing me down, so largely abandoned this approach: in the source code you can see a Powerup object along with a setting which would show which powerup was active; in the end I just used a variable set to either on or off to activate a shield.

The code is also a bit of mess - there's UI code which is quite tightly coupled to the game logic - things like the 'Play' button and the message system (which flashes up 'Win!' or 'Lose') should probably be in another file, or at least abstracted in some way. As I mentioned above, there's also a lot of code which I'm not really using, as a result of trying to make everything reusable.

Tools/resources