Due to family matters, I simply did not have time to finish my entry for the JS13K competition. I am still, however, going to do a postmortem.
What Went Right – Good Idea
The theme for the competition was 404. This is the Page Not Found error code for HTML pages. The idea I had was a stealth game where you need to find your way out of a procedurally generated multi-level dungeon while avoiding being detected by the 404 inhabitants. Ideally, assuming I could squeeze it into 13k, I would have used my ray caster to have the game in 3D using a procedurally generated rock texture. The sprite for the enemy would be generated using simple drawing commands then made into a sprite sheet.
To make sure the game was completable I was going to write a utility to play through randomly generated levels keeping the seed to the levels that could be completed then use the seeds for level data. This is related to my thesis work as part of my work involves creating solvers for playing through procedurally generated platformer levels.
Mixed Blessing – Components Completed
Parts of the game had been completed before hearing the bad news about my father but because I never actually got to finish the game, I consider this to be mixed. Perhaps I will be able to use the code in a future project. Three things were completed before hearing the bad news. I had a random number generator (based off of PCG) so reseeding would be possible. This is necessary for JavaScript as there is no was of seeding the build-in random method. I had my map generator for generating the levels. And I had the texture generator for generating the rock texture and with parameters and color changes this would have even allowed for variety between the map levels.
What Went Wrong – Family Matters
Things have been totally nuts over the last few weeks. With bad news regarding my father, relatives have been visiting in case they don’t have another chance (a real possibility but as this is a private matter I will not go into details). Combined with having to drive to different cities to take my father to appointments and dealing with lawyers and accountants my spare time was next to none. Then the fridge died and needed replacing. So needless to say, the real world was not kind to me so the only choice I had was to cancel the game development which is sad as I think if I could have pulled off what I wanted to accomplish it would have been a great entry.
Not sure what I am going to do next month. Probably a post-mortem on porting my Vampire Attack game from Flash to JavaScript, but going over my texture generator is also a possibility.
