rubyquest - Day Four

So after four days of using LimeJS and the Google Closure Library to code our game, we realized that moving forward, it would bring us more problems than solutions and made a decision that should almost never be done: we switched frameworks. In our case, I believe that it actually made a lot of sense. LimeJS is very good for what we were trying to accomplish, but unfortunately, it's a framework that's not actively developed. We chose Phaser because it's the most popular JavaScript framework for games and it has a very nice and active community. 

So, after four days of coding, we decided to scratch everything and start from zero. Our biggest problem with LimeJS was doing animation and movement, and we were able to solve that with Phaser in about 4 hours. 

But No Framework Is Perfect

The problems with frameworks is that not one will cover everything that you need. While movement and animation is a lot easier with Phaser, transitioning from scene to scene is harder. Also, doing dialogue and inserting labels onto the screen can be hard. The way we are approaching that is by manipulating the DOM rather than the Canvas element of HTML only. 

We have jQuery code that toggles on/off our dialogue boxes, and also our main menu. This way, we call it from our game with the press of a button, and then it'll just show up on top of our game.
This approach might not be the tidiest but it works for what we are trying to do and it's pretty simple to implement. It'll also be good practice for when we have to implement our puzzles which will send an AJAX request to our server from an input box.

Our demo is almost done and we really need it for tomorrow as we need to present it for us to keep the project alive. 

rubyquest - Day One

After assembling the team on Friday, this past Saturday, February 21st, we finally sat down with team !Fer (pronounced 'not fair') to start coding. For our Pitch Day we are creating an Educational RPG, which may actually be the first of its kind. We decided to go very JavaScript heavy for our final project as it's not our strongest language and we really want to learn it. Also, HTML5 games are the future in gaming as it supports many different platforms. We are aiming for web and mobile support for our game.

The Framework

Our first board on what we are going to need for the game.

We chose LimeJS as the framework we'll use to run our game as it provides us with the best tools for what we are trying to accomplish. It uses the Google Closure Library, which was used to create Gmail for example. It's a very powerful library, but from what we've seen so far it can be quite tricky as it's pretty much a new language itself. 

We decided to take Friday night and Saturday morning as our 'learn the basics' day. That meant that we would watch tutorials, read documentation and look at source code to get a feeling of what we were getting into.  I can say that Mario, Travis and I went through this cycle of 'what am I doing!?!?' to 'I got this!!' and back to 'what am I doing!?!?' many times throughout the day.

The Coding

Since we need an actual website to run our game, we also decided to use Rails to power it up. We are going to need a database to store some information for our game, and we also want to have some features such as a Forum where players can interact, post questions, get help, etc. We also want to implement a Reviews section so we can get feedback on our game. Lastly, the website is going to have a Log In system that we will build from scratch instead of using Devise as it will not only be a great learning experience, but it will also let us customize it as we please.

             Second board on game functionality.

After quite a few hours of coding, we were able to accomplish quite a few things but we are having some problems using the keyboard to run our game. So far we've only been able to use the mouse which is not ideal but at least it works for now. We've reached out to different developers who have used LimeJS in the past to see if they can help us with this issue.

Going Forward

We really would like to solve the issue of using the keyboard for input, we are really going to need it for our puzzles, but so far we've created a mousepad that we can use to move our character around. We are using free art that we found online so far and we have not yet implemented animation to our walking but we will get there eventually I am sure. We'd like to have a five minute playable demo by Friday, so then we have another two weeks to really polish the game.