10 ms·

Show HN: I've been making one HTML5 game per week. Here's my 10th game

362 points by lessmilk 13y ago

MichaelTieso 13y ago
How experienced were you before you started? Have you coded before? Any reason you're not open sourcing your code? Seems like it'd be a great idea considering you're still learning and could use some feedback from others. Great job btw. Never heard of Phaser but now looking into it.
- lessmilk 13y ago
  I have a bachelor's degree in computer science, and I coded a few side projects. And I'm considering going open source.
atom-morgan 13y ago
Thanks a lot for posting this as well as one of your posts I saw a few weeks ago. Because of your website I tried making my own simple game with Phaser and found it to be very fun. For someone who'd never programmed a game before, it was interesting to see how everything comes together. Just a simple game was very fulfilling to me.
lessmilk 13y ago
OP here. Let me know if you have any questions about my project.
- taylorscanlon 13y ago
  I have two for you! Feel free to ignore them if they're a bit too personal. 1) What is your previous work experience before beginning this? 2) Is your goal to get into the gaming industry, or is this just a hobby? [edit] I also just want to say I really enjoy your project! It's motivated me to start something similar... soon.
- notastartup 13y ago
  what game engine or tools are you using?
  - lessmilk 13y ago
    Engine: Phaser [0], a Javascript framework to make 2D games. Tools: Sublime Text and Photoshop mainly. [0]: www.phaser.io
    - notastartup 13y ago
      how did you make the sprites and animate them? do you have a tutorial on this?
      - lessmilk 13y ago
        I simply use Photoshop. No real tutorial on this yet, but I plan to write one in the next few weeks. In the meantime you can read about my process making the sprite for game #6 on my blog: http://blog.lessmilk.com/pixel-art-how-i-made-the-princess-in-game-6/ http://blog.lessmilk.com/pixel-art-how-i-made-the-princess-i...
- jaxytee 13y ago
  Any chance you release these on mobile?
  - lessmilk 13y ago
    You mean releasing native iOS/Android games? Yes, I'm thinking about it.
    - Romoku 13y ago
      You could trying porting the web games using phonegap[0] or titanium[1]. [0] http://phonegap.com/ http://phonegap.com/ [1] http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/titanium-sdk/ http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/titanium-sdk/
    - gcb0 13y ago
      i'm tempted to just get all those games, put in a "full screen" page and adding either touch events or simply using the trackball (which a few old ancient android phones still have)
    - octopus 13y ago
      Don't bother with PhoneGap on Android, the experience is terrible (especially on Android 4.4). A good alternative is the CrossWalk project. On iOS PhoneGap runs reasonably well.
- methehack 13y ago
  I think it's awesome. Haters hate. Love that it starts with a wtf challenge -- invests the user. Love that your exploring mechanics without all the news.
- sweedy 13y ago
  hey lessmilk, I liked the games, actualy played longer then i intendet the #6 :=) The Gameplay Mixing Board was used for the ingame music in the last one. Is this a free musik then, or did you just asked the autor to use it?
- eiliant 13y ago
  On the last level, there's a part where you have to get coins on a ledge with three reds, two up and down, and one horizontally moving. I kept getting hit by the horizontal red even though I didn't go down the ledge.
- reidrac 13y ago
  Why a week? I'm trying the "one game a month" challenge and I find it very difficult for one single reason: cut out things so it's possible to finish the game in a month! Do you think it would be harder if you had more time per game?
zhemao 13y ago
Nice. Reminds me of the game Thomas was Alone.
sauravt 13y ago
@lessmilk, I love all your games. Great Job.
- lessmilk 13y ago
  Thanks a lot! :-)
razorsese 13y ago
Do you make any revenue from it?Or just pure hobby?
- lessmilk 13y ago
  It started as a pure hobby with no revenue. But now that my project is getting a lot of attention, I might start making iOS/Android apps, or maybe write ebooks about how to make games.
joezo 13y ago
I love the way the tutorial is part of the background, seamless! A colleague of mine made a similar type of game a while ago, this reminded me of that. http://www.tyasdev.com/MrBandana/ http://www.tyasdev.com/MrBandana/
- WesleyJohnson 13y ago
  I can't get through level 2.
michael_nielsen 13y ago
Here's an article with lots of interesting background info from the same author (lessmilk), "What I learned while doing my 'one game per week' challenge": http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasPalef/20140225/211663/What_I_learned_while_doing_my_quotone_game_per_weekquot_challenge.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasPalef/20140225/211663/What_... Worth it especially for the following superb link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototype_a_game_in_under_7_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototyp...
- lessmilk 13y ago
  If you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll get an updated version of the gamasutra article that you linked.
  - michael_nielsen 13y ago
    I really enjoy your games and (especially) the tutorial side. Great stuff! But I have been a bit put off by the frequent plugs for your newsletter. Of course, you couldn't have known that before commenting here, and so I hesitated a while before posting this. But I figure it may be a useful data point. In any case, I hope you keep up the great work, I'll certainly be following!
tantalor 13y ago
A significant number of devices on the web don't have keyboards. They use touch as their primary interface. Please support touch devices.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Platformers tend to be crappy on touch devices unless you're prepared to do a lot of work designing your game around both control systems, probably difficult in a week.
- codezero 13y ago
  For this kind of experience building project I think it's fine to be a bit feature limited, however it would be great to try doing at least one touch only game to help build out other interaction options.
  - lessmilk 13y ago
    Game #7 works very well for touch devices.
sillysaurus3 13y ago
Not sure if you're looking for critique, and giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN, but: It's pretty good for a week of work. Though there's a difference between being challenging and being annoying. Many of the level design elements could be classified as a "dick move." An example would be not making it clear the goal is to collect all the coins until after the player has bypassed some of them and reached the end. In general the controls are too sluggish. It's as if triple buffering is enabled, or maybe quad buffering. If you're at a university, you should try to borrow a high speed camera and measure the time difference between when someone presses the spacebar vs when the character starts to jump. I don't know if it's a Chrome thing or what, but I fell off cliffs several times due to the input delay. The gravity could be better. I'd recommend spending some time with Cave Story to get a feel for how to make gravity really work in the player's favor, rather than against them. In general it's a bad idea to make velocity strictly linear. Some acceleration adds to the experience and precision. A checkpointing system would be good. I can see how most players will give up after getting mostly to the end and then dying. I think you should just restart players from the last point that they were on the ground without dying, that is, the most recent ledge that they were standing on. It shows promise. If you're looking for feedback about how to advance as a game developer, one step would be to make sure you're not rewriting your entire game engine from scratch for each game. It's excellent that you're writing your own engines rather than trying to use other people's, so be sure to keep doing that. It's important for gamedevs to have an idea of the underlying principles and limitations, and the best way to do that is to write your own engines. I got the feeling that most of the week was spent on the engine rather than iterating on the gameplay or level design though. Teaming up with an artist or a level designer might be a good match.
- yukichan 13y ago
  > In general the controls are too sluggish... other stuff He made this in a week. It's a demo of what you can do in a week. You're reviewing it like it was a serious game. > giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN Bad critiques are. Yours is not a bad critique, I just think you're critiquing the wrong thing.
  - 13y ago
WesleyJohnson 13y ago
I've been following your progress with these games and there are several I really like, most of which is I think #5 with the cube jumping. I can't sing you enough praise on posting these as inspiration to others and sticking with the one game per week timeline. The motivation alone is inspiring. That said, this one is frustrating. I feel the keys are off. I like to run before I jump and in some areas, it's not possible because the responsiveness of the keys just isn't there. It takes too long for my guy to jump after I press up. Also, it seems like you're possibly doing your left/right code in a way that gives left priority. If I press both left and right, my guy goes left. I feel like he should stay stationary in that situation. Other than that, I like the gameplay, tutorial text that's part of the scene, the sounds and music. I really like the cube slanting to show motion, too. Clever. Keep it up!
Ellipsis753 13y ago
It's a great game. Just my sort of thing really and I really like the music. It only took a couple of minutes to beat though so it's a little short. Then again for a weeks work it's fine. Keep up the good work.
fiblye 13y ago
I'm a hobby/hopefully someday profitable game developer who recently jumped on the "develop a short game in X days" bandwagon. My most recently made game was developed in 2 days [ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ektomarch.PanicCircle https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ektomarch.... ], and damn did it feel good to get something done that fast! My current plan is to make a bite-sized game comparable to this at least once a month (it'd be a little stressful to force myself to come up with something fresh every single week) and maybe just experiment with small projects with no plans for completion in between. I also have a long-term project that I'm expecting will take ~2 years, and honestly, sometimes I feel like I've run out of ideas. Taking time away from my main project to work on these little "distractions" actually ends up helping with my main work. I spend less time idly waiting around for a good idea or solution to a persisting problem, and more time solving new, smaller problems that can later be applied somewhere else. Hell, I actually find myself actively switching between tasks every 10 minutes and ending up even more productive than I would be focusing on just one project. Also, I had no real experience with Unity before this game, and just taking a couple of days to force myself to learn it opened some doors for future big projects. In short, work on tiny projects whenever you find yourself doing nothing. You might end up more productive or just happier knowing what you're capable of.
- bluedino 13y ago
  What consists of a 'day'? Coming home from work or school and working on it until 10pm? Spending an entire Saturday pounding away at it?
  - fiblye 13y ago
    It was a full Saturday and Sunday of work--about 12-15 hours total. A large portion of that was adapting to C# and reading up on Unity documentation.
- baby 13y ago
  Do you have a video showing off your game? It looks good in the pictures but I'm curious as to how it looks in movement. What are you developing them with?
zakqwy 13y ago
Easy to learn, difficult to master. Great game, needs more levels.
pla3rhat3r 13y ago
Love the spirit of this. Good stuff. Keep building! :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
meylingtaing 13y ago
Don't know if it's just me, but opening up the webpage crashes my browser. I'm using Firefox on an Ubuntu virtual machine.
cognivore 13y ago
It takes longer to load than Skyrim.
- lessmilk 13y ago
  That's the HN effect. Google Analytics tells me that there are more than 600 active visitors on lessmilk right now.
trevoragilbert 13y ago
Fun game, hooked me for longer than I'd have liked. :) Curious why you chose HTML5?
ultimatedelman 13y ago
can't beat it my ass! http://i.imgur.com/xKTvH81.png http://i.imgur.com/xKTvH81.png :) great game. i enjoyed it! very similar to super meat boy
Brashman 13y ago
I'm slightly afraid of clicking on game links on HN after 2048.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Don't worry nothing is that addictive...
- biesnecker 13y ago
  Seriously. I thought I was fine until I was reading HN on my phone and thought to myself "hmmm... I wonder if the game works well on a mobile browser." It does. #fml
davbryn 13y ago
It seems pretty stuttery on Safari running on my Mac, but was fun for a while - good job! I didn't actually like the explanations throughout the first few levels: sometimes it would be nice to figure things out on your own; feels like you rob the player of the reward for completing the level when you explain it to them before letting them figure it out? Especially since they can restart pretty quickly: case in point, let them fall into the red and die early on rather than explain it?
deletes 13y ago
You hit detection is off. It you make a game with pure rectangles the detection should be completely precise.
- user24 13y ago
  I'm also seeing this issue. Example, I died right after taking this screenshot: http://imgur.com/Egy49Kv http://imgur.com/Egy49Kv
  - diydsp 13y ago
    yes i died catching my breath in the same place. i repeat what person above said about rectangles meriting perfect collisions. still a nice diversion. i like the way on my system, several bitmap redraws occur per screen trace, giving the character a parallelogram shape. subjectively, it looks like he's in a hurry :)
collyw 13y ago
As a mainly backend developer, I just signed up for the book, realised it didn't contain too much, but links to the tutorials. I had a quick read. and I would say it would be more accurate to call the title "One Javascript game per week". I got a bit excited thinking you could produce that sort of game using just HTML5. Hope I don't sound overly critical, as its a cool game and I appreciate you posting it.
- kibibu 13y ago
  It uses HTML5 canvas and audio APIs.
  - collyw 13y ago
    All front end Javascript uses HTML elements. I thought it meant pure HTML 5.
joshferg 13y ago
reminds me of this game http://www.avalanchegame.org/ http://www.avalanchegame.org/
Fasebook 13y ago
Glad to see the technology HTML5 is capable of has come so far.
Havoc 13y ago
Clever thread title. I bet "one HTML5 game per week" made quite a few people click on it. :)
jakobe 13y ago
This is great! It's incredibly awesome how much you can take away from Mario and still have a fun game. I love how the rectangle slants to show that you are moving. The game feels really responsive! (Macbook Air, Safari 7.0.2) The progression in difficulty seems just right. This is exactly what casual gaming should be like.
yangcanvas 13y ago
I've seen/played a couple of your earlier games as well as this one. They all have a good look and feel and are pretty legit mini-games. I'll also take the opportunity to plug my HTML5 game collection: http://yangcanvas.com/arcade http://yangcanvas.com/arcade
P4u1 13y ago
kudos man, your creativity is impressive, good work.
jordan0day 13y ago
I literally LOL'd at the "yeeeeaahhh" upon level completion.
atulagarwal 13y ago
I loved the games. They aren't simply demo projects, but real, interesting & challenging games! Good game play, actually enjoyed them! :)
keerthiko 13y ago
I'm impressed with the general quality:time-spent ratio. I think the basic level design and polish steps are fairly well done. Even the sluggish controls (as a number of people have pointed out) feel more limited by lack of engineering time than your understanding of what feels good, and I would guess that through some rigorous testing and closer scrutiny of your code that could easily be fixed. However, I think you exhibit some game design anti-patterns. I am referencing Zileas' List of Game Design Anti-Patterns[1], that I think game designers should reference more often until it's a quick checklist whenever they design any game. Most notably I think Dark Blue succumbs to "False Choice" and "Or We Could the Player." [1] http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=293417 http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=...
Rusky 13y ago
Pretty good game for a week. Most quick and/or beginner platformers I see have a lot of glitches with collision detection and response. You pretty much nailed it. Critique-wise, the low end of the variable jump height is a little high, and if the game lags it messes up the physics (e.g. in the first tunnel of the last level the player stayed up against the ceiling longer than usual, missing the platform).
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
Beat it. Last level is pretty hard. In order to make important jumps register press jump first, then start moving.
knackers 13y ago
Loved the 'artwork'. Simple but immediately familiar. Like some other commenters, I felt that sometimes my jumps weren't being registered.
blinkymach12 13y ago
These are excellent, well done! Thanks for both documenting your progress and taking the time to inject character into your games.
soapdog 13y ago
This series of games is an inspiration. I decide to take another look into phaser after seeing your stuff!
elyrly 13y ago
Check out MelonJS to beef up the themes
listic 13y ago
1. What do I need to learn to start making games like this? 2. Is it hard to make games that fill the browser screen?
stefan_kendall3 13y ago
Responsiveness of the controls needs work, but the game was just frustrating enough. I died 19 times. Not nearly as brutal as super meat boy :P
jonalmeida 13y ago
After a little self-psychoanalysis I've realized that when I see "this is a hard level, you can't beat it", it makes me want to try even harder which is a neat idea to use in more games to get more people playing.
watermarkcamera 13y ago
that's very good ,if can run mobile,it's a good idea!
juleska 13y ago
i loved the second one xD ... it sends me back in the atari's days hehehehe, nice job man.
OWaz 13y ago
Have you been writing anywhere about the things you've learnt so far? The challenges with the framework you've used or anything you started to do to speed up development?
jtcain 13y ago
Awesome work! Keep it up!
eric_h 13y ago
I think these are the best set of flappy bird clones that have come out yet (except perhaps the flappy bird orbital game). Admittedly, only a couple of them truly qualify for that title (annoyingly difficult gravity games with stupid simple controls), but I think they all adhere to the same theme - extremely simple game ideas that are nevertheless compelling. In the Atari-NES era, technical constraints forced this style of game design upon developers, and they (well, some of them) still produced compelling games by focusing on the details of these simple interactions. There are admittedly somewhat similar constraints on this particular canvas (ahem) but I believe the tools have evolved so much that you can spend a lot more time on the mechanics, rather than fitting it into RAM (hence, 10 rather polished 8-bit style games in 10 weeks). I think it's good to get back to basics. I played all 10 games, and I enjoyed it (though the typing game was downright cruel; it's amazing how difficult it is to read and understand a misspelled word, then type it misspelled, let alone the gibberish). Well done.
xwowsersx 13y ago
This game is awesome. I love the "yeeah" at the end of a section.
gschier 13y ago
That's so good for a day. I made a similar game a while ago that took a few weeks! http://platformpixels.com/ http://platformpixels.com/ I would be interested to know what you used for collision detection (If anything).
beingProgrammer 13y ago
I have been trying to write a small game. But after having seen this. Holy Cow! It's so minimally(don't know if that counts as an adjective) Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
canadev 13y ago
That was awesome. I finished it. I died 92 times. The jumping mechanics reminded me of "air control" in strafe jumping in Quake 2. Can you tell I haven't played games much lately? Love the music. I have had the tab opened for a few minutes now that I'm done playing just listening to it loop through.
cyphunk 13y ago
americans love to be positive but ill just be honest: the game play sucks. a great project for hitting out code and learning but pretty brutal for actually game play and enjoyment. but keep banging away at it, im sure a hit will come out eventually.
mehulkar 13y ago
May favorite part is the sound byte when you finish a level. "Yeaaah"
Dogamondo 13y ago
I may have bagged this game for being way too simple a few weeks ago. But after Flappy Bird, the genre seems to live on. It's annoyingly great. Keep up the good work!
BostX 13y ago
GREAT!!!
aravind_b 13y ago
A Hack to jump farther and higher in Game#10!! Try this, 1. open Game#10 in chrome 2. Open the web inspector 3. Go to profiles, choose Record Heap Allocations, and start 4. Now try playing the game. You should be able to jump farther and higher. In some levels, even overcome multiple climbs in a single shot than otherwise Also notice kind of slowdown overall. But not necessarily a drag since all the key events are still taken in seemingly the same speed So why is this? Or is it another Chrome one-off?
tripzilch 13y ago
Well done! A few bits of constructive criticism, based on my own experiences with making platformers in GameMaker: - you need to fix the gravity so it doesn't feel like it's on the moon. I used to get the gravity wrong as well, but it makes for so much more fun and snappy gameplay when you get it right (or actually, a bit more right, cause nobody really jumps that high anyway). - assuming your game logic goes a little something like, if the player is standing on something solid, they can jump: instead doing that, give the player a few frames (3-5) of leeway while they still can jump even though they just walked off a platform ledge. it's a very subtle thing, and if you don't pay attention you won't see that most platformers do this, but it makes all the difference in gameplay (if the player feels like they would have totally made that jump, but drop off the ledge instead, it feels like their character just stumbled or something). the last one is also based on one of the golden rules of gameplay: try to make the game behave as the player wants, which is not always necessarily exactly how the controls are input. (the following stuff is not really critique of your game but some things to keep in mind as you continue) similar tricks involve making the hitboxes of "good" objects larger than they actually are, and the hitboxes of "bad" objects smaller (player thinks: "phew! cool! I barely missed that enemy!!"). btw Flappy Bird subverts this rule, which makes part of its interesting frustratingness, but as always you gotta know the rules before you break the rules. and remember, you can always make your levels harder, if you think such tricks make it too easy on the player. you'll find that in such cases "harder" translates to "challenging" instead of "frustrating". good luck!

362 points by lessmilk 13y ago

How experienced were you before you started? Have you coded before? Any reason you're not open sourcing your code? Seems like it'd be a great idea considering you're still learning and could use some feedback from others. Great job btw. Never heard of Phaser but now looking into it.

lessmilk 13y ago
I have a bachelor's degree in computer science, and I coded a few side projects. And I'm considering going open source.

atom-morgan 13y ago

Thanks a lot for posting this as well as one of your posts I saw a few weeks ago. Because of your website I tried making my own simple game with Phaser and found it to be very fun. For someone who'd never programmed a game before, it was interesting to see how everything comes together. Just a simple game was very fulfilling to me.

lessmilk 13y ago

OP here. Let me know if you have any questions about my project.

taylorscanlon 13y ago
I have two for you! Feel free to ignore them if they're a bit too personal. 1) What is your previous work experience before beginning this? 2) Is your goal to get into the gaming industry, or is this just a hobby? [edit] I also just want to say I really enjoy your project! It's motivated me to start something similar... soon.
notastartup 13y ago
what game engine or tools are you using?
- lessmilk 13y ago
  Engine: Phaser [0], a Javascript framework to make 2D games. Tools: Sublime Text and Photoshop mainly. [0]: www.phaser.io
  - notastartup 13y ago
    how did you make the sprites and animate them? do you have a tutorial on this?
    - lessmilk 13y ago
      I simply use Photoshop. No real tutorial on this yet, but I plan to write one in the next few weeks. In the meantime you can read about my process making the sprite for game #6 on my blog: http://blog.lessmilk.com/pixel-art-how-i-made-the-princess-in-game-6/ http://blog.lessmilk.com/pixel-art-how-i-made-the-princess-i...
jaxytee 13y ago
Any chance you release these on mobile?
- lessmilk 13y ago
  You mean releasing native iOS/Android games? Yes, I'm thinking about it.
  - Romoku 13y ago
    You could trying porting the web games using phonegap[0] or titanium[1]. [0] http://phonegap.com/ http://phonegap.com/ [1] http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/titanium-sdk/ http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/titanium-sdk/
  - gcb0 13y ago
    i'm tempted to just get all those games, put in a "full screen" page and adding either touch events or simply using the trackball (which a few old ancient android phones still have)
  - octopus 13y ago
    Don't bother with PhoneGap on Android, the experience is terrible (especially on Android 4.4). A good alternative is the CrossWalk project. On iOS PhoneGap runs reasonably well.
methehack 13y ago
I think it's awesome. Haters hate. Love that it starts with a wtf challenge -- invests the user. Love that your exploring mechanics without all the news.
sweedy 13y ago
hey lessmilk, I liked the games, actualy played longer then i intendet the #6 :=) The Gameplay Mixing Board was used for the ingame music in the last one. Is this a free musik then, or did you just asked the autor to use it?
eiliant 13y ago
On the last level, there's a part where you have to get coins on a ledge with three reds, two up and down, and one horizontally moving. I kept getting hit by the horizontal red even though I didn't go down the ledge.
reidrac 13y ago
Why a week? I'm trying the "one game a month" challenge and I find it very difficult for one single reason: cut out things so it's possible to finish the game in a month! Do you think it would be harder if you had more time per game?

zhemao 13y ago

Nice. Reminds me of the game Thomas was Alone.

sauravt 13y ago

@lessmilk, I love all your games. Great Job.

lessmilk 13y ago
Thanks a lot! :-)

razorsese 13y ago

Do you make any revenue from it?Or just pure hobby?

lessmilk 13y ago
It started as a pure hobby with no revenue. But now that my project is getting a lot of attention, I might start making iOS/Android apps, or maybe write ebooks about how to make games.

joezo 13y ago

I love the way the tutorial is part of the background, seamless! A colleague of mine made a similar type of game a while ago, this reminded me of that. http://www.tyasdev.com/MrBandana/ http://www.tyasdev.com/MrBandana/

WesleyJohnson 13y ago
I can't get through level 2.

michael_nielsen 13y ago

Here's an article with lots of interesting background info from the same author (lessmilk), "What I learned while doing my 'one game per week' challenge": http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasPalef/20140225/211663/What_I_learned_while_doing_my_quotone_game_per_weekquot_challenge.php http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasPalef/20140225/211663/What_... Worth it especially for the following superb link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototype_a_game_in_under_7_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototyp...

lessmilk 13y ago
If you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll get an updated version of the gamasutra article that you linked.
- michael_nielsen 13y ago
  I really enjoy your games and (especially) the tutorial side. Great stuff! But I have been a bit put off by the frequent plugs for your newsletter. Of course, you couldn't have known that before commenting here, and so I hesitated a while before posting this. But I figure it may be a useful data point. In any case, I hope you keep up the great work, I'll certainly be following!

tantalor 13y ago

A significant number of devices on the web don't have keyboards. They use touch as their primary interface. Please support touch devices.

jiggy2011 13y ago
Platformers tend to be crappy on touch devices unless you're prepared to do a lot of work designing your game around both control systems, probably difficult in a week.
codezero 13y ago
For this kind of experience building project I think it's fine to be a bit feature limited, however it would be great to try doing at least one touch only game to help build out other interaction options.
- lessmilk 13y ago
  Game #7 works very well for touch devices.

sillysaurus3 13y ago

Not sure if you're looking for critique, and giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN, but: It's pretty good for a week of work. Though there's a difference between being challenging and being annoying. Many of the level design elements could be classified as a "dick move." An example would be not making it clear the goal is to collect all the coins until after the player has bypassed some of them and reached the end. In general the controls are too sluggish. It's as if triple buffering is enabled, or maybe quad buffering. If you're at a university, you should try to borrow a high speed camera and measure the time difference between when someone presses the spacebar vs when the character starts to jump. I don't know if it's a Chrome thing or what, but I fell off cliffs several times due to the input delay. The gravity could be better. I'd recommend spending some time with Cave Story to get a feel for how to make gravity really work in the player's favor, rather than against them. In general it's a bad idea to make velocity strictly linear. Some acceleration adds to the experience and precision. A checkpointing system would be good. I can see how most players will give up after getting mostly to the end and then dying. I think you should just restart players from the last point that they were on the ground without dying, that is, the most recent ledge that they were standing on. It shows promise. If you're looking for feedback about how to advance as a game developer, one step would be to make sure you're not rewriting your entire game engine from scratch for each game. It's excellent that you're writing your own engines rather than trying to use other people's, so be sure to keep doing that. It's important for gamedevs to have an idea of the underlying principles and limitations, and the best way to do that is to write your own engines. I got the feeling that most of the week was spent on the engine rather than iterating on the gameplay or level design though. Teaming up with an artist or a level designer might be a good match.

yukichan 13y ago
> In general the controls are too sluggish... other stuff He made this in a week. It's a demo of what you can do in a week. You're reviewing it like it was a serious game. > giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN Bad critiques are. Yours is not a bad critique, I just think you're critiquing the wrong thing.
- 13y ago

WesleyJohnson 13y ago

I've been following your progress with these games and there are several I really like, most of which is I think #5 with the cube jumping. I can't sing you enough praise on posting these as inspiration to others and sticking with the one game per week timeline. The motivation alone is inspiring. That said, this one is frustrating. I feel the keys are off. I like to run before I jump and in some areas, it's not possible because the responsiveness of the keys just isn't there. It takes too long for my guy to jump after I press up. Also, it seems like you're possibly doing your left/right code in a way that gives left priority. If I press both left and right, my guy goes left. I feel like he should stay stationary in that situation. Other than that, I like the gameplay, tutorial text that's part of the scene, the sounds and music. I really like the cube slanting to show motion, too. Clever. Keep it up!

Ellipsis753 13y ago

It's a great game. Just my sort of thing really and I really like the music. It only took a couple of minutes to beat though so it's a little short. Then again for a weeks work it's fine. Keep up the good work.

fiblye 13y ago

I'm a hobby/hopefully someday profitable game developer who recently jumped on the "develop a short game in X days" bandwagon. My most recently made game was developed in 2 days [ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ektomarch.PanicCircle https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ektomarch.... ], and damn did it feel good to get something done that fast! My current plan is to make a bite-sized game comparable to this at least once a month (it'd be a little stressful to force myself to come up with something fresh every single week) and maybe just experiment with small projects with no plans for completion in between. I also have a long-term project that I'm expecting will take ~2 years, and honestly, sometimes I feel like I've run out of ideas. Taking time away from my main project to work on these little "distractions" actually ends up helping with my main work. I spend less time idly waiting around for a good idea or solution to a persisting problem, and more time solving new, smaller problems that can later be applied somewhere else. Hell, I actually find myself actively switching between tasks every 10 minutes and ending up even more productive than I would be focusing on just one project. Also, I had no real experience with Unity before this game, and just taking a couple of days to force myself to learn it opened some doors for future big projects. In short, work on tiny projects whenever you find yourself doing nothing. You might end up more productive or just happier knowing what you're capable of.

bluedino 13y ago
What consists of a 'day'? Coming home from work or school and working on it until 10pm? Spending an entire Saturday pounding away at it?
- fiblye 13y ago
  It was a full Saturday and Sunday of work--about 12-15 hours total. A large portion of that was adapting to C# and reading up on Unity documentation.
baby 13y ago
Do you have a video showing off your game? It looks good in the pictures but I'm curious as to how it looks in movement. What are you developing them with?

zakqwy 13y ago

Easy to learn, difficult to master. Great game, needs more levels.

pla3rhat3r 13y ago

Love the spirit of this. Good stuff. Keep building! :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

meylingtaing 13y ago

Don't know if it's just me, but opening up the webpage crashes my browser. I'm using Firefox on an Ubuntu virtual machine.

cognivore 13y ago

It takes longer to load than Skyrim.

lessmilk 13y ago
That's the HN effect. Google Analytics tells me that there are more than 600 active visitors on lessmilk right now.

trevoragilbert 13y ago

Fun game, hooked me for longer than I'd have liked. :) Curious why you chose HTML5?

ultimatedelman 13y ago

can't beat it my ass! http://i.imgur.com/xKTvH81.png http://i.imgur.com/xKTvH81.png :) great game. i enjoyed it! very similar to super meat boy

Brashman 13y ago

I'm slightly afraid of clicking on game links on HN after 2048.

Ygg2 13y ago
Don't worry nothing is that addictive...
biesnecker 13y ago
Seriously. I thought I was fine until I was reading HN on my phone and thought to myself "hmmm... I wonder if the game works well on a mobile browser." It does. #fml

davbryn 13y ago

It seems pretty stuttery on Safari running on my Mac, but was fun for a while - good job! I didn't actually like the explanations throughout the first few levels: sometimes it would be nice to figure things out on your own; feels like you rob the player of the reward for completing the level when you explain it to them before letting them figure it out? Especially since they can restart pretty quickly: case in point, let them fall into the red and die early on rather than explain it?

deletes 13y ago

You hit detection is off. It you make a game with pure rectangles the detection should be completely precise.

user24 13y ago
I'm also seeing this issue. Example, I died right after taking this screenshot: http://imgur.com/Egy49Kv http://imgur.com/Egy49Kv
- diydsp 13y ago
  yes i died catching my breath in the same place. i repeat what person above said about rectangles meriting perfect collisions. still a nice diversion. i like the way on my system, several bitmap redraws occur per screen trace, giving the character a parallelogram shape. subjectively, it looks like he's in a hurry :)

collyw 13y ago

As a mainly backend developer, I just signed up for the book, realised it didn't contain too much, but links to the tutorials. I had a quick read. and I would say it would be more accurate to call the title "One Javascript game per week". I got a bit excited thinking you could produce that sort of game using just HTML5. Hope I don't sound overly critical, as its a cool game and I appreciate you posting it.

kibibu 13y ago
It uses HTML5 canvas and audio APIs.
- collyw 13y ago
  All front end Javascript uses HTML elements. I thought it meant pure HTML 5.

joshferg 13y ago

reminds me of this game http://www.avalanchegame.org/ http://www.avalanchegame.org/

Fasebook 13y ago

Glad to see the technology HTML5 is capable of has come so far.

Havoc 13y ago

Clever thread title. I bet "one HTML5 game per week" made quite a few people click on it. :)

jakobe 13y ago

This is great! It's incredibly awesome how much you can take away from Mario and still have a fun game. I love how the rectangle slants to show that you are moving. The game feels really responsive! (Macbook Air, Safari 7.0.2) The progression in difficulty seems just right. This is exactly what casual gaming should be like.

yangcanvas 13y ago

I've seen/played a couple of your earlier games as well as this one. They all have a good look and feel and are pretty legit mini-games. I'll also take the opportunity to plug my HTML5 game collection: http://yangcanvas.com/arcade http://yangcanvas.com/arcade

P4u1 13y ago

kudos man, your creativity is impressive, good work.

jordan0day 13y ago

I literally LOL'd at the "yeeeeaahhh" upon level completion.

atulagarwal 13y ago

I loved the games. They aren't simply demo projects, but real, interesting & challenging games! Good game play, actually enjoyed them! :)

keerthiko 13y ago

I'm impressed with the general quality:time-spent ratio. I think the basic level design and polish steps are fairly well done. Even the sluggish controls (as a number of people have pointed out) feel more limited by lack of engineering time than your understanding of what feels good, and I would guess that through some rigorous testing and closer scrutiny of your code that could easily be fixed. However, I think you exhibit some game design anti-patterns. I am referencing Zileas' List of Game Design Anti-Patterns[1], that I think game designers should reference more often until it's a quick checklist whenever they design any game. Most notably I think Dark Blue succumbs to "False Choice" and "Or We Could the Player." [1] http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=293417 http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=...

Rusky 13y ago

Pretty good game for a week. Most quick and/or beginner platformers I see have a lot of glitches with collision detection and response. You pretty much nailed it. Critique-wise, the low end of the variable jump height is a little high, and if the game lags it messes up the physics (e.g. in the first tunnel of the last level the player stayed up against the ceiling longer than usual, missing the platform).

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

Beat it. Last level is pretty hard. In order to make important jumps register press jump first, then start moving.

knackers 13y ago

Loved the 'artwork'. Simple but immediately familiar. Like some other commenters, I felt that sometimes my jumps weren't being registered.

blinkymach12 13y ago

These are excellent, well done! Thanks for both documenting your progress and taking the time to inject character into your games.

soapdog 13y ago

This series of games is an inspiration. I decide to take another look into phaser after seeing your stuff!

elyrly 13y ago

Check out MelonJS to beef up the themes

listic 13y ago

1. What do I need to learn to start making games like this? 2. Is it hard to make games that fill the browser screen?

stefan_kendall3 13y ago

Responsiveness of the controls needs work, but the game was just frustrating enough. I died 19 times. Not nearly as brutal as super meat boy :P

jonalmeida 13y ago

After a little self-psychoanalysis I've realized that when I see "this is a hard level, you can't beat it", it makes me want to try even harder which is a neat idea to use in more games to get more people playing.

watermarkcamera 13y ago

that's very good ,if can run mobile,it's a good idea!

juleska 13y ago

i loved the second one xD ... it sends me back in the atari's days hehehehe, nice job man.

OWaz 13y ago

Have you been writing anywhere about the things you've learnt so far? The challenges with the framework you've used or anything you started to do to speed up development?

jtcain 13y ago

Awesome work! Keep it up!

eric_h 13y ago

I think these are the best set of flappy bird clones that have come out yet (except perhaps the flappy bird orbital game). Admittedly, only a couple of them truly qualify for that title (annoyingly difficult gravity games with stupid simple controls), but I think they all adhere to the same theme - extremely simple game ideas that are nevertheless compelling. In the Atari-NES era, technical constraints forced this style of game design upon developers, and they (well, some of them) still produced compelling games by focusing on the details of these simple interactions. There are admittedly somewhat similar constraints on this particular canvas (ahem) but I believe the tools have evolved so much that you can spend a lot more time on the mechanics, rather than fitting it into RAM (hence, 10 rather polished 8-bit style games in 10 weeks). I think it's good to get back to basics. I played all 10 games, and I enjoyed it (though the typing game was downright cruel; it's amazing how difficult it is to read and understand a misspelled word, then type it misspelled, let alone the gibberish). Well done.

xwowsersx 13y ago

This game is awesome. I love the "yeeah" at the end of a section.

gschier 13y ago

That's so good for a day. I made a similar game a while ago that took a few weeks! http://platformpixels.com/ http://platformpixels.com/ I would be interested to know what you used for collision detection (If anything).

beingProgrammer 13y ago

I have been trying to write a small game. But after having seen this. Holy Cow! It's so minimally(don't know if that counts as an adjective) Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

canadev 13y ago

That was awesome. I finished it. I died 92 times. The jumping mechanics reminded me of "air control" in strafe jumping in Quake 2. Can you tell I haven't played games much lately? Love the music. I have had the tab opened for a few minutes now that I'm done playing just listening to it loop through.

cyphunk 13y ago

americans love to be positive but ill just be honest: the game play sucks. a great project for hitting out code and learning but pretty brutal for actually game play and enjoyment. but keep banging away at it, im sure a hit will come out eventually.

mehulkar 13y ago

May favorite part is the sound byte when you finish a level. "Yeaaah"

Dogamondo 13y ago

I may have bagged this game for being way too simple a few weeks ago. But after Flappy Bird, the genre seems to live on. It's annoyingly great. Keep up the good work!

BostX 13y ago

GREAT!!!

aravind_b 13y ago

A Hack to jump farther and higher in Game#10!! Try this, 1. open Game#10 in chrome 2. Open the web inspector 3. Go to profiles, choose Record Heap Allocations, and start 4. Now try playing the game. You should be able to jump farther and higher. In some levels, even overcome multiple climbs in a single shot than otherwise Also notice kind of slowdown overall. But not necessarily a drag since all the key events are still taken in seemingly the same speed So why is this? Or is it another Chrome one-off?

tripzilch 13y ago

Well done! A few bits of constructive criticism, based on my own experiences with making platformers in GameMaker: - you need to fix the gravity so it doesn't feel like it's on the moon. I used to get the gravity wrong as well, but it makes for so much more fun and snappy gameplay when you get it right (or actually, a bit more right, cause nobody really jumps that high anyway). - assuming your game logic goes a little something like, if the player is standing on something solid, they can jump: instead doing that, give the player a few frames (3-5) of leeway while they still can jump even though they just walked off a platform ledge. it's a very subtle thing, and if you don't pay attention you won't see that most platformers do this, but it makes all the difference in gameplay (if the player feels like they would have totally made that jump, but drop off the ledge instead, it feels like their character just stumbled or something). the last one is also based on one of the golden rules of gameplay: try to make the game behave as the player wants, which is not always necessarily exactly how the controls are input. (the following stuff is not really critique of your game but some things to keep in mind as you continue) similar tricks involve making the hitboxes of "good" objects larger than they actually are, and the hitboxes of "bad" objects smaller (player thinks: "phew! cool! I barely missed that enemy!!"). btw Flappy Bird subverts this rule, which makes part of its interesting frustratingness, but as always you gotta know the rules before you break the rules. and remember, you can always make your levels harder, if you think such tricks make it too easy on the player. you'll find that in such cases "harder" translates to "challenging" instead of "frustrating". good luck!