18/10/21 – This week, we were introduced to Phaser, a 2D game framework for making HTML5 games in JavaScript and followed a demonstration in creating a basic 2D platformer
This workshop covered many aspects in quick succession, such as creating the player, camera, handling movement, animations and collisions, creating objects such as collectables and hazards, alongside additional functionalities.
I have little doubt that my future games in phaser will use all of these aspects and I’ll likely be looking back to the code from this workshop to help me add them in.
Next development I chose was to add a ’round’ counter so the player could keep track of how many times they cleared all the stars, and so I could increase difficulty/reward based on the wave, firstly by multiplying the score earned by the round number and then by increasing the number of bombs added per round as well, although after playtesting it I found the game became too unfair so I removed that.
I also decided to add a new background as well, something a little higher quality/resolution than the default one to make the scene look a little better.
After adding the new background, I started to think a lot more about what I could do with the level environment – if I recreated the background I chose in Photoshop then I could separate elements such as birds and clouds from the background and add them individually to the level and give them movement. I also thought about creating different versions of the sky background for different times of the day and change the background on wave completions. I got a proof of concept ready as I made this before a talk with one of my lecturers and his feedback will likely be really helpful.
My lecturer suggested I could do this easily by changing background alphas but recommended the alpha changes rapidly to keep the game processing-wise running smoothly (large background).
I did plan on getting this idea fully working on the weekend but then heard we’re going to start using ‘Tiled’ next week for creating our levels so I thought I’d leave this idea for later.
My first Phaser game can be accessed here