One day, a few weeks ago, I had decided that it was about time I started making web games again.  Computers are faster, the choice of technology is greater and my skills are better.  Also as an added bonus, this years game conference awarded top scores to simple, non graphic intensive games.This shows a shift in gaming taste to focus on gameplay and not intense graphics.  That's good news for me since I only make simple games that focus on unique gameplay.

So I decided that I'l play with technology at the same time as making the game.  I had originally planned on making the game in SVG/Javascript, but hit a performance issue once I started doing full screen scrolling.  I develop the game on my eeePC since it has a small screen and a slow processor.   That way I'm forced to keep the performance in mind.  After hitting a wall with SVG and not being able to speed up the engine without drasticly cutting features out of my game, I rewrote the engine to use canvas tag.  This was a little faster in Firefox, worked in more browsers, but for some strange reason, crawled to a halt in Safari.  Part of it might be because my Safari was in a WindowsXP guest inside of a VirtualBox hosted by Ubuntu Linux.  My friend on a real windows box didn't have the same problem.
The current released version of the game is at http://roundabout.creationix.com/.  It is under massive development untill I'm able to release my level editor.  For the moment you can play the first three test levels to see some features of the game.  I doubt it runs at all in Internet Explorer since that browser doesn't support the canvas tag.  I even included the js hack that tries to convert it to vml, but still no good with my tests.
Test it out, tell me what you think.  And if anyone is interested in developing levels, let me know and I'll send you a link with an admin account when that part is done.


3 Comments

By: Mitchell Allen on July 22, 2008

Hi Tim,
Roundabout is pretty cool.
Is there some kind of acceleration / ant-gravity physics going on? Just when I thought I had a rhythm, the starball when charging off in the opposite direction :)

I only tried the first level, as I fear mashing my fingers to a pulp.
(Why do we tend to press so hard on keyboards to emphasize our intentions?)

It would be fun to build levels. Is there a guide for level building?

Cheers,

Mitch

By: Tim Caswell on July 22, 2008

No, there is no anti-gravity stuff going on. There seems to be a bug in most browsers where the onKeyUp events aren’t getting to my code in time for it to respond. The effect seems worse when the cpu is maxed out, like when scrolling the screen. I’m making a level editor at the moment, It should be done enough to use in a couple of days. Currently you can edit levels, but not save.

By: Tim Caswell on July 22, 2008

UPDATE:
The level editor is now usable but far from done. I switched the python backend to use webob instead of paste and it installed much easier on my server.

You can now go straight to a level by passing the name to the url http://roundabout.creationix.com/?blocks loads the first level and http://roundabout.creationix.com/editor.html?blocks loads the editor for that level

To edit a level, you use the arrows to move the cursor. the number keys and the first row of letters sets the block types. Escape saves the level. It prompts you for the new level name and the redirects the page to the actual level to play it. Simple hit back in your browser after testing to make further edits. The player starts where the cursor is when you save the level.

At the moment there is no authentication and anyone can save over anything except for the 4 built in levels.

Have fun!

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