Video Game Programming

GWC Community Geek Hobbies
#1

Hello all!

Ok, so long story short… I started teaching myself computer programming when I was about 8 years old because I always had a dream to create a video game. Now, 20 years later, I have a job as a computer programmer, but in data systems and business applications. I’ve also always struggled with just what medium would be best to create a video game with if I ever chose to do so. And in the past whenever I’d try to get started with one I’d always get over-whelmed with the complexity of trying to create one comparable to modern games. Finally, I’ve come to the realization, I am not going to create the next Dragon Age game as a hobbyist game programmer.

However, I’m seeing now with some of the current technologies it should be very possible to create a “last gen” game in a new way… that is a Final Fantasy: Tactics style game in a web browser! And thus my new goal…

A game, using some brand new web technologies to create a game that is run completely in the web browser (no Flash or applets or anything to download and install), a game also with modern smartphones in mind (be able to play it from your Android web browser too), a game using various concepts from others that I like…
A Combat system (turn-based charge times) and Design style (Isometric tile view) similar to Final Fantasy: Tactics
A spell cost system similar to Magic: The Gathering card game
A “social”/MMO component for multiple friends to do dungeon crawls together
And something I’d ideally love to do, a random dungeon generator… love those kinda games for their great replay value.
And some kind of map editor / scripting system for people to create their own area & puzzles that they can then share for others to explore.

Just to see if such a thing were doable I put together a super small test, and it appears it should be very doable! This is about a day of work to learn the technical details I was missing and make something functional…
http://web1.busn4.com/HTML5TilePoC/

This is all still in early planning / brain storming stages, but being that the GWC Community is some of the most creative people I know I thought I’d throw the idea out there and ask if anybody else has any ideas for anything or interested in helping out with anything (graphics, textures, story-line, etc) please let me know.

#2

Looks interesting.

#3

Sounds pretty interesting. One thing I have been having a lot of fun with lately is Jquery.
http://jquery.com/
They had a lot of great Javascript functions for doing complex things realivitly easily. HTML5 is also worth taking a look at. I’ll see if I can come up with any cool ideas.

#4

Thanks for the suggestions, Fenatic

HTML5 is actually the main thing making this possible… via the <canvas> element =) That little test I did was to make sure I could fetch tiles from the server and render them compounded together in the browser to create the game-space all in client-side script.

And I love jQuery, I use it heavily in my web apps and even have written a handful of my own extensions for it. However, it actually adds a considerable amount of time to the page load as it is a very vast library (and making this work from a mobile device is a strong focus for this project so speed is important). So hopefully I’ll be able to recreate the animation functionality it provides without the full jQuery library via HTML5 and my own flat javascript.