“g (for jump)” and the engine behind it

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“g (for jump)” and the engine behind it

Recently I’ve been thinking about the idea of a platformer game engine written entirely in HTML5 and JS.

After making clear the basic rules of the project, like…

it should be open source, version controlled, hosted on GitHub
all the graphics elements must be dynamically created – no prerendered images (JPG, PNG) should be used, everything must be created by the engine
all the sounds and musics must be dynamically created also – no prerendered sounds, samples, musics (WAV, MP3, FLAC) should be stored, they must be rendered by the engine
later on it should be allowed (for the sake of flexibility) to use prerendered stuffs
the graphics, sound and level data must be separated from the engine – to be flexible and easily

… and after I realized the Gamedev competition of Function 2012 Demoscene Party is near I started to think a bit… I had 10 to reach a state where the engine (and a game based on it) can be “released”, shown to the public. Minus the daily worktime at the company where I work, of course. Without any deeper knowledge in HTML5 canvas and absolutely no experience in synth programming? Uhh… Well… Seems interesting — challenge accepted!

Long story short, after about one week I’ve had a little game with (mostly) working basic physics (collision detection and handling, gravity), a somewhat working multichannel synth, game and level data represented as an array and an engine to parse it, graphics for the game elements. Not that bad, but I still had no animation handling, no animation graphics, no sounds, no music, no levels… Two days before the compo I created the animations (and the handler for them), created the chiptune-ish effect for the synth. On the day before the compo (and in the morning of it) I created the levels, and just before it (about 40 minutes I guess) I created the “music”.

I still had no splash screen, no sounds, but hey! At least I had some bugs…

The game and the engine was far from “ready”, but it was “representable”. (I hardly believe I will say it is ready in the near future, but I am still working on it.)

Here are some screenshots: