"Make a game in a month, with crazy retro-like restrictions, and if you win you we'll put it in a real-life arcade machine in front of the general public." Now that's a pitch that I'd find difficult to walk away from. And so I poured selected parts of my heart and soul into "DIGIBOTS & CO."... a game by Mr Speaker.
Into the third dimension
My loyal long-term readers (by whom I mean Anton) would know my technological aesthetic bent strongly favour the 1980s. Seeing as the third dimension was not discovered until 1992, I have thus far had little inclination to bother with it. But things have changed: now that the 90s are suitably retro I feel it's finally time to gently prod at the edges of this strange new plane...
Pix Up, Look Sharp: a pixel resizer for Pixelmator
Pixelmator is a fantastic image editor for Mac, but it lacks the ability to stretch an image via a "nearest-neighbor, big pixels please" method. I know, right?! Anyhoo... I made a Quartz Composer called plugin Pix Up, Look Sharp that does it for you, allowing you to set the width and height scaling amount.
To use it, simply drop the plugin in your ~/Library/Compositions/ folder and it'll appear in Pixelmator under "Other" in your effects browser. I can't figure out how to resize the destination output area from within Quartz itself, so you first have to stretch your canvas to accomodate the new pixels before you run the plugin. Sorry 'bout that. Hopefully pixel stretching will be included in a future version of Pixelmator - but until then: Pix up, Look Sharrrrp!
More is Zmore
Ludum Darer JellyCakes has been live streaming his playing-and-rating efforts of entries in Ludum Dare 26. He's an excellent reviewer: testing each game very thoroughly and fairly. And he's hilarious. After giving my entry a good run through its paces he concluded with the above video. Might not fit the competition's theme of "minimalism", but dang... it's awesome!
ZMORE: a game in 48 hours
Here's my entry for Ludum Dare #26, on the theme Minimalism. Read on for more »
DHTML Lemmings: an awesome hack
That image is the punchline to the question I awoke with in the middle of last night: "How the FLIPPIN' 'ECK did that guy do destructible terrain for DHTML Lemmings... in 2004?!!!". I lay there for some time as thoughts raced through my mind: There was no canvas element in 2004. No WebGL. In fact, there was no direct pixel access of any kind! (Not counting black and white XBM images, which had been killed off by then anyway).
Eventually I was forced to get out of bed and take a look. The answer, as pictured above, was a piece of creative brilliance: each level is a simple jpg image that sits in the background. As diggers dig down they add "holes" - small black images - to the page. every few pixels dug requires a new hole image.
Destruction via creation! That's the kind of lateral thinking that'll get you places.
Short function syntax is here!
It's happened. It's finally happened. Short function syntax is here! At least, if you're running the nightly version of Firefox (which I am now, due to my promise to adopt the first browser to introduce short function syntax).
Short function syntax replaces the lengthy function keyword with a symbol =>, and the almost-as-lengthy return keyword with the much shorter nothing (for one-liners).
However, this change represents far more than a few saved keystrokes: it marks the beginning of JavaScript as a serious functional programming language. Read on for more »
#Random Hex colour
Want a random colour between white and black?
"#" + (Math.random() * 0xffffff | 0).toString(16)
That is all.
[Update: after I posted this I thought... i bet this has been done a zillion times already. It was, and by Paul Irish in 2009 no less. Additionally - it doesn't work. The best looking one there was:
'#'+('00000'+(Math.random()*(1<<24)|0).toString(16)).slice(-6);
Three.js: looking away from .lookAt
Have a hankering to look in the opposite direction of the vector you get from Three.js's .lookAt function? You need .lookAwayFrom! Dunno if there's an easier way, but the idea is find the vector between the target you'd normally "look at" and you, then add the resultant to your current position, and look at that instead! Here's the standalone function:
function lookAwayFrom(me, target) {
var v = new THREE.Vector3();
v.subVectors(me.position, target.position).add(me.position);
me.lookAt(v);
}To face away from an enemy, you might do something like lookAwayFrom(player, enemy) and away you scarper. If you want to integrate it into Three.js, so you can do player.lookAwayFrom(enemy) then here ya go:
lookAwayFrom: function(target) {
var v = new THREE.Vector3();
v.subVectors(this.position, target.position).add(this.position);
this.lookAt(v);
}