Jared Ratner
Nov 6 · 4 min read
Space Paradox Combat Environment

S.P.A.C.E.

Our project is designed to bring back a feeling of nostalgia from the age of Flash web games.. Our team members are Jared Ratner, Mark Hedgeland, and Nathan Peterson. As we needed to invoke the feeling of playing a simple, but polished game, we quickly looked into how a possible game could be created to play through a webpage. We found JavaScript with a game framework would be our best path to creating a game in the style we wanted. Ultimately Mark and Nathan worked on the JavaScript for the game itself, and I (Jared) worked on the web stack for our site, and the html/css for the page.

It was a difficult decision for my team to choose what to make our project about. Ultimately we settled on wanting to make a game that reminded us of our early interests in computers. Games such as bloons, and FTL were an inspiration for us. We attempted to play some of the old games we used to play but found out that many of them still required flash, so we knew we had to make sure our game required nothing but what is in a normal web stack. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript only for front end work.We wanted to make sure that anyone with a modern browser would be

stack

My team chose each technology we used with care. The main feature of our website is the game itself. For that we switched frameworks at least once. We switched from CreateJS to Phaser3. Phaser3 is a modern javascript game creation framework. It handles quite a few important things for us, but the most noticeable feature it adds for our users is the ability to interact with our game through touch screen. Both mobile and desktop touch screen devices work natively with our game. The second most noticeable feature is provides is it allows us to load in music for our game into any browser. The music and sound effects are attached to the game directly so when a tower fires, a sound can be played, instead of just background music playing through the HTML page. A third feature in our game is custom sprites for all of our towers and enemies. The custom sprite sheets were much easier to implement thanks to phaser3. All of our backend technology was chosen because I have worked with it before so it would take less time to set up and get running than using unknown/untested to me technologies.

Because of the fact that we used unknown technologies to make the game itself caused plenty of problems. One major one that we solved last minute was an end condition for our game. Normally a game would have multiple things called scenes. One scene is used for each part of the game normally. So a title screen is one, game is another, and end screen is another. For our MVP we wanted to at least have an end screen on our game. Throughout the weeks we spent on the game each of us attempted to implement scenes in different ways, all with the same result. No way for the other scenes to load in. We tried and tried, even let Nathan try code up until the last minute. Ultimately we thought of a quick last minute fix for an end screen. Nathan found a way to get the game to throw up a quick ‘GAME OVER’ in the middle of the screen to end the game once lives reached 0. And with that we implemented it morning of our presentation. Ultimately we made it and it stinks we could not get scenes working so we could not implement many more features we wanted, but it’s a miracle we had a game that could end for our presentation.

I learned in this project that one should stick with known and tested technologies. For the backend we had no problems because I had worked with the pieces before. But for the front end (the game) we had problem after problem while using phaser, and before that createJS was even worse with its incompatibilities and outdated framework. I also learned that one should not rely on others to get part of projects done. If you have to ask more than twice it’s worth just doing it yourself. In the future I will make sure to know a technology before going in to a timed project using it. Also VScode is great and super modular.

PS:

I’m Jared Ratner, a recent first year Holberton Graduate. I enjoy working with web stacks, frontend, backend, apis, everything.

Project links:

https://spacetower.space (the game)

https://github.com/zmbslyr/S.P.A.C.E. (github for project)

http://landing.spacetower.space (landing page)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-ratner-b56b0b152/ (linkedin)

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