Bluzix Bytes

I nearly forgot about this event this year...but can you blame me!  Hopefully, even with all the craziness this year, I'll be able to complete Hacktoberfest 2020 ! I signed in with my GitHub profile and then they made me watch a video about how to make a pull request.  The goal is to still get four pull requests by the time this month is over.  I should be able to do that this year. I'll try to find a project to work on tomorrow, though.

 *Sigh*  It happened again!  Oh, well.  Let's just see how much I can get done before the deadline.  If I don't finish this one, I'll add it to the pile of games to finish:  right next to Shield Bearer. I've been brainstorming a bit on how I could do a menu.  I feel like I should treat a menu like Levels themselves:  the graphics will be drawn on the world, Ratio-Vision will capture that one section and render it, and all the inputs will be driven by a menu controller object.  In fact, I've been brainstorming of a way to handle controls as well:  I feel like there needs to be some sort of abstraction layer so I'm not checking the Unicode for each key, I just have to make sure that a player or controllable object implements certain actions from this controller object.  I'll call this Master Controller!  Yeah, it's not as original as Ratio-Vision, but I wanted a simple name that perfectly describes its functions. I want Master Co...

Oh no! Did I really spend fourteen days not coding! No need to really panic, I've been designing most of the game in my spare time. Though I lost so much valuable time not coding! If I didn't tell you already, the theme for 2020's JS13K Game Jam is 404.  One of their example interpretations  was "something missing".  So, I came up with this idea of a Memory-Puzzle-Platformer game where you play as a character that needs to go through this big door.  The issue:  parts of the door are missing and you need to collect the part(s) on the other side of the map to get them.  You will have to avoid enemies and jump on platforms to get to the other side of the map while trying to remember the part of the door that you might be missing.  Once you get to the other side of the map, there will be multiple pieces that could be part of the door or bogus pieces that will waste your time.  I decided to call this game Whole Door.  It's both the objective o...

 Sadly, I've just been coding stuff for my job: very boring websites and no games.  I'm sorry that I lied about coding on the 7th of March 2020.  Things got pretty hectic during the pandemic!  Now, I want to get ready for JS13K games 2020 !  So, let's work some more on Daemon to re-familiarize us with how to make games in HTML5! I haven't been actually coding, but I've been brainstorming on what to do about how many pixels I should try to make each cell on my grid.  I eventually had the thought that it was the wrong question to ask.  What I eventually came up with was a way to force a certain aspect ratio for a canvas that would be used to draw the sections of the map/world as my "camera".  I call it Ratio-Vision! Ratio-Vision is an object with functions to normalize the display between different screen sizes.  One of the problems I found out with my games was that they would play differently depending on the size of my screen.  Shield B...

I don't think I'm going to make it.  I'll drop out of Metroidvania Month if I can't get anything playable by then, but I will continue to work on this game. So, I started to get back into things by just modifying the SaveFile class.  I figured that I might not want to reload the Player's Health and Ammo every time they reload the game.  It would have made it very easy to cheat the game:  get to a Save Room by a boss, save, refresh the page to restart the game, load the old Save Slot, and you're now at full Health and Ammo.  Now the SaveFile has the hp, filledTanks, and heldMissles to keep track of the Player's Health and Ammo to help avoid that cheat. While I was editing the SaveFile class, I also figured I should refactor the way I keep track of explored areas.  My original idea was to have a new field in the SaveFile and that field would be a 2D Array for each Area.  That means to set if the Player has visited a spot on the "map" for the Test...

Yeah, I missed a day.  Hopefully, I can still get Daemon in a working state on time. I was looking into possible control schemes for the game and managed to find some documentation on Gamepads for HTML5 .  It seems like it is just like adding the Gamepad's "keyup" Events to the window, but you have its connect/disconnect Events as well.  I think it would be nice to have a Gamepad and have the game play like Super Metroid.  However, I don't think all the controllers are the same: a button on an Xbox controller plugged into the PC might use a different Event than the same button on a PS4.  They might confirm to the standard Gamepad setup , but I don't want to add any extra complications at this time.  So, I'm just going to focus on WASD and Arrow Keys on the Keyboard for now.  Maybe add a touchscreen control pad for smartphones later.  I'm just trying to get stuff to a working state first, then I'll add those extra features in the future. My fir...