Javascript Games
Spaceship Racer
Manual as Word Doc | Manual as PDF
Spaceship Racer is a simple game mechanic testbed in which you guide a small, unmanned spacecraft around a solar system. Use your ion thruster and solar sail to steer the ship. I would appreciate feedback on this testbed, including your best times around each of the 3 levels.
The final game, if I write it, will be a multiplayer game in which races take place over days or weeks, meaning that players will not watch their ships continuously. Instead, they will log in at intervals to make course corrections and adjust the ship's systems.
Hachibee
The casual game Hachibee began life as a simple prototpye called Bucket. I created Bucket in stages, each being a complete, playable game. Hachibee is the final stage in which I added graphics and two different game modes. Sadly I haven't done high scores. You'll have to write them down yourself.
Stage 1 - Proof of Concept Demo
This demo is a complete playable game with five levels.
Use the arrow keys to move the bucket.
Please forgive the slightly dodgy collision code! I made a deliberate decision to add new features rather than spend another week perfecting the mechanics. It works fine most of the time, but occasionally a ball will pass through the bucket's walls. Maybe I'll re-theme the game in terms of quantum particles and then we can call it a feature ;)
Stage 2 - Alpha Version
The alpha version of Bucket has powerups and 20 levels.
Stage 3 - Post-Alpha Version - Hachibee
This is a work in progress where I'm experimenting with a graphical theme, and a few other adjustments. It's got a lot of rough edges - this is just to see how the new style works. 'Hachi' is the Japanese word for bee.
Bucket is copyright © Shelagh Lewins 2009. Hachibee is copyright © Shelagh Lewins 2010.
Flatland
You can also have a play with the Flatland demo which I plan to develop into an A-life game.
FlatlandAn unexpected challenge was to adapt standard computer game vector maths to work in browser space, where the y axis points down instead of up. It's not rocket science, but it took me several goes to get it right! If you'd like to use any of the utility functions, feel free. If you do, I'd be glad if you can let me know especially if you find bugs in them!
At present, all the Flatlanders do is follow each other around. You can drag them around to encourage them to follow somebody different. However I did put in some nice UI: a modal, draggable Settings dialog, Run and Pause, and the ability to set the random seed. The random seed algorithm took some research as I needed one that you can make reproducible, and that is mathematical rather than depending on buffer overflows. It's probably not awesomely random but it is fine for a game, where reproducibility is the bughunter's best friend, and essential for checking that the behaviour is the same in different browsers.
Flatland is copyright © Shelagh Lewins 2008