This post mainly catalogues the series of changes I waded through in game prototyping adventures for a month or two, mostly for my own purposes. If you’d like to skip to playing the final result, it’s here.
This is a list of all the significant, stable versions of a game prototype I occasionally worked on during evenings for a month or two. I adjusted the exported index.html to optionally take in a query param of blob that points to a git SHA and it will load the index.js corresponding to that point in the code history.
TL;DR – I can make playable links to past code!
I found myself backtracking too much while working on a more complex, multiplayer version of this game so I decided to spend some time with a single-player prototype version of it for awhile so I could quickly shift the rules around to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t without a week of coding for each trial. Each of these chunks of changes mostly correspond to less than a full day of work. The first link with the 7 digit hex text is a link to play the game at that version, the “browse” or “compare” links take you to the source code diff that correspond to the described changes.
The eventual goal of this project is much more complex than these prototypes suggest, their purpose is to really focus on the gameplay mechanics possibilities that come out of a world made of tiles that can be one of either of two colors, or neither, as well as creatures that are made of the same color energy as the tiles (referred to after this as “mobs”) which have some sort of “conservation of energy” type relationship with the color in the tiles. The player is an interloper of sorts that can blend in with either of the colors harmoniously or fight against the current chaotically.
In the eventual game there will be more robust goals and interactions between systems (this colored tile system would be one of many of those) but for the purpose of these prototypes consider your goal to be moving down to the bottom of the grid without getting surrounded. For the first handful of them that might be a bit too easy, so alternatively try arranging tile colors into a certain pattern. Basically just move around the game universe and get a feel for it.
Controls: up, down, left, right – moves selection cursor
mobile: “O” button to select a move, “X” button to change targeted direction (later prototypes only)
pc: “Z” key to select a move, “X” key to change targeted direction (later prototypes only)
7a6b4b5 (browse) – first js export
- moving only, no interaction with room
- no sounds
- ugly colors
- no mobs
8a0326f (compare) – added mobs and pathfinding-derived moves
- mobs added that move towards you and block you
- they move to where you were, not where you’re going, so too easy to avoid them
- they spawn all around a tile when you pick it up so if you pick up a lone tile they completely surround you
- if you know how the game works there’s no challenge, if you don’t then it’s too suddenly punishing
- you only pick up/drop a tile when you choose to, no advantage to holding color
- you can move over any tile you want while not holding color
- can’t hold more than one of a color
- can’t kill mobs in any way
- mobs only chase you when you’re holding color
05d9748 (compare) – added sound effects
- mobs don’t move if you don’t move
- sound effects which ended up sticking around for awhile
- pathfinding animations for mob and player, they all move at the same time although the mobs still move towards where the player was
- pick up and drop automatically when moving
- only spawn 1 mob per color action
- better mob colors
520888b (compare) – more aggressive mobs, more sfx, animation improvements
- cursor selection visual tweaks
- all mobs chase you when gray
- mobs cancel out with each other when adjacent
- add slight quadratic easing for movement
- make mobs appear to come out of your avatar when spawning
- add sfx for movement, failing to move the cursor, and mobs canceling out
- player moves slower while no color
- 2 mobs spawn from every color action
dd916d7 (compare) – mobs chase player, back to 1 mob spawning, selection visual tweaks
- mobs go to where player moves to, not where player moved from
- 1 mob spawns for each color action
- circular selection icon
- clearer avatar shape/color to make seeing the background tile easier and the avatar color change more obvious
92a02a7 (compare) – huge scrolling map, mobs cancel out from spawning
- map extended below the screen
- a panning camera that follows the avatar added
- when spawning mobs via color actions, prioritize any mobs that can cancel out as targets automatically
- because of how many enemies there are and poor optimizations, there’s moments of noticable lag when the enemies are pathfinding
- note – shooting one’s way out of being surrounded is nice in this version since the mobs don’t move unless you do so you can blow open a hole and escape even in a crowd… would be interesting to see what adding user-aimed shots to this would be like
8b45d30 (compare) – player/tiles can have a stack of color rather than just 1, mobs can move when player doesn’t
- Disable mobs cancelling out on their own (need to “shoot” new mobs at old mobs to kill them)
- Simplify camera movement
- Allow mobs to move when player waits (unless the player is immediately adjacent)
- Make player and tiles able to accumulate color – dropping n accumulated color drops it all at once and spawns n mobs
- Add particle effects to indicate a high stack of color
- when spawning mobs, if there isn’t room for them then don’t spawn them even though you “spent” color in the process
- note – it’s too easy to kill endless mobs safely by making sure you’re holding color and cycling pick up and drop until there are none left
3943fc6 (compare) – balance tweaks to fix previous version being too trivial
- Make player unable to pick up color without moving – prevents pickup/drop cycling to clear nearby enemies trivially
- Fix a few bugs around particle emitting
- Make mobs not block mobs/player of the same color
- Adjust player and mob max move distances for balance
- Make a separate variable for how far away a mob can be activated by a player from how far they can move (ie, they can now move towards a player even if they can’t quite it reach yet)
d2de1e8 (compare) – Add experimental mouse support
- Difficult to detect whether the player has a mouse or a finger
- Types of interface for mouse and finger are very different and it’s a lot of extra maintenance and design to keep them both in-line
- Eventually removed in a later commit due to new features that were too tedious to make work with a mouse, but sticks around until then
06f3cb4 (compare) – Add color-stacked enemies and a death screen
- Make 4 different enemies representing color stacks of 1, 2, 3, 4+
- When shooting out more than 1 color it comes out as a 1 large mob rather than n mobs of size 1
- Add a “DEAD – click to try again” death screen where the enemies scramble around your dead body aimlessly
- Target the largest nearby enemy when shooting out mobs so you can kill the biggest one quickly
- Start the player at 3,3 instead of 0,0
- note – targeting the biggest enemy ended up making it too tedious and complex to clear groups of enemies
0485c63 (compare) – smarter mobs, more restricted gray movement, dropped color only results in mobs
- As gray, you can only move onto the edge of a cluster of color – once pathfinding walks over a color tile it stops searching
- When dropping color it does not turn back into a tile, solving the cycling exploit without the confusion (previously it was solved by not being able to pick up a tile without moving) – also tends to make the total amount of color shift in forms rather than get created or destroyed
- Mobs now prioritize targets (in descending order of priority – neaby enemy players, nearest enemy mob, larger friendly player, nearest friendly mob larger than us)
- If a mob has no viable targets, wander aimlessly
- When a stack of color is held, only fire one color instance each turn rather than a big shot of 4 color
- Fix death screen not being centered after moving the camera
- note – at this point I’m starting to try to polish existing behavior to a “local maxima” of good gameplay to wrap up the prototype project
b8bb143 (compare) – Simplify and cleanup code, make mobs prioritize players targets similarly to mob targets, choose which direction to shoot
- Mobs used to have separate prioritization for targeting mobs vs players but that’s now been flattened to make players treated similarly to other mobs to give more of a “being among equals” feel
- Direction to “fire” new mobs is now explicit – shows you what color it will be, prioritizes a nearby opposite color, and allows you to change the selection with button 2
- Mouse support was finally removed to avoid having to support fire-direction with the mouse somehow
- Lots of code removal and cleanup now that a lot of behavior has been properly retired
74ac27e (compare) – Targeting visual tweaks, go-like capturing, HUD-like indication of color stack or vulnerable (gray), friend-boosting
- Made targeting graphics a bit clearer about what’s about to happen
- Enemies can now be not only canceled out by “firing”, but also surrounded like go stones. when surrounded they revert to tiles
- Visual indicator of how many colors you have or if you’re vulnerable (gray) since it’s way easier to die while gray
- Now possible to fire at friend mobs (ie, the same color) which makes them bigger. Usually this is undesirable, but I needed to add it to avoid a possible situation where you can land between friendly mobs and not have any possible direction to shoot or move