Rocambolli and other good things from 2016

So, I have been working in this javascript game for almost two years now! The first A Glass of Lores post was in 31 january 2015! So I have been learning, and you can say some piles of javascript code has been lying around. 😁

I have been learning a lot for the past years, I have recently read A Theory of Fun, for more input on how to make fun games, and I also needed some help on code, so I've read Game Programming Patterns, and a long list of web articles that I can put on a new post once I can find all of them! Also, with Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Contagious: Why Things Catch On I started my foray in understanding basic marketing. I am trying to also learn WebGL by reading WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming and at last I decided to install Unity in Ubuntu and try to learn C# - I am approaching this in a slow pace since I plan to finish my main game before diving too much on it. Let's see things done...

Rocambolli

Recently I participated in Ludum Dare 37, which had the theme One Room. It has been a ton of time since I participated in similar events, and this one was marked by going outside of my home during theme announcement, and meeting the really great Rafael Giordanno who motivated me a lot by talking his previous 7 short games, his learning, and his teaching. I was a bit unsure if I would be able to do something, going compo, which means doing a game alone, and doing everything, planning, level design, code, graphics, music, sounds! But after he told me how prepared he was, and that he was curious to what I was going to do, damn, I was going to start and finish something in that weekend.

What followed next was some crazy fast coding, in javascript, and 25 hour later I had a really ugly code, that generated this platformer game, Rocambolli, with sounds and everything working. Oh, and a Itch.io account! And the github with everything is here. This was awesome, and I want to do this again!

KTG - Keyboard Touch and Gamepad

Under heavy time constraints I coded a spaghetti interface.js, this code is awful, but it worked, and was great with keyboard and gamepad working! Rocambolli could be played. Two days later I had an idea to do this proper, and I created the KTG - Keyboard, Touch and Gamepad project. The idea is to have a simple javascript library that could unify how a simple javascript game would deal with keys, be them on touch screen, a keyboard or a joystick. I really like it! If you are doing something with javascript, this could be a simple drop in solution. I plan to mature it and migrate it into my fgmk project! Now after Ludum Dare I have moved KTG to Rocambolli so it can be played in mobile too!

Fullscreen Button

Also, when doing a tiny javascript game, I find myself often in need for a fullscreen button, since going fullscreen is still not easy on mobile without adding the page to home screen. So if you are ever in need of this, I got you covered now!

A Glass of Lores

I will leave just a link to a youtube video of a somewhat recent status of the first scene in A Glass of Lores, just so people can know the project is going forward! Here's something: making a RPG takes a long time.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, and see you next time. 🙌