UV maps and tiled Pixel art

3D objects today are often built up from a mesh of triangles. To let the object know how to paint a texture on it a UV map is used, which is a set of relative coordinates in an image that references every corner in a triangle.

From inheritance to traits

When I started this project I was quite fond of inheritance. Inheritance is great for a lot of things, but if you are inheriting more than 3 levels you’re either doing something particular or you are on you way to inheritance hell.

Automated game system testing using Karma and Travis CI

A while ago I wrote about successes in testing and the ending of that article I talked about getting these system tests to run on Travis CI. Travis CI is a project that offers free build pipelines for open source projects on GitHub…

Megaman’s Costumes: the failed Shader approach

In all Megaman games when you equip another power, Megman changes his color.

The “clothing” of the character graphic in Megaman 2 always has exactly two colors swapped. I could create all these graphics by hand but that…

Complete System testing for Web Games

I’m going to wrap up the last 8 months in a short story to lay the premise.

First public demo

The other day I held the first public demo. I call this version 0.1. It’s far from complete. Only Heatman’s and Flashman’s stages are playable, but the bulk of the experience is there.

Lagging in the video was introduced by the video capturing process on my Macbook Air.

Level markup

I’ve chosen to use XML for level markup. I know that XML has a bad reputation in a lot of circles, but this will not be a post about defending my choice.

For now, each level has it’s own XML document. To create a new level you need at least a <scene type=”level” name=”Bubbleman”>…

TimeStopper

One of the woes of this project has been how to create Flashman’s TimeStopper weapon. A core value I always had since I started writing this engine was to keep separation of concerns close to perfect. And I felt like I would have to taint some controllers with tasks they were not meant to handle to solve…

Level Editor and Camera Paths

I’m struggling with enjoying working with the level editor. It’s not as fun. And I’m constantly ping-ponging between the feeling that “having a separate level editor in regular HTML is probably the easiest” and “I should just make a switch in the game that puts it in edit…

Debugger

A game engine needs good ways of debugging games. My engine doesn’t provide much of that kind. I felt like the debug code polluted my project. I could already expose collision zones, but since I wrote the camera path feature I felt I needed a good way to debug that as well.