Posts Tagged ‘game mechanics’

• By Rich

  Tags

  components, framework, game mechanics

  Posted in

  HTML5

  30 comments

  How we approached the design of our HTML5 game framework

  20th Jul 2012

  30

  First of all I just wanted to say that the framework we’re working on (which we’ve nick-named Kiwi.js) isn’t just a Photon Storm project. I’m jointly coding it with the super-talented Ross Kettle, and you should definitely check out his blog for some exciting WebGL and Stage3D experiments, including a rather neat Furious Furball demo. We’ve also got the Instinct Entertainment team behind us, providing service and plugin development and community management – and of course once we release it, hopefully you can join in too!

  But I just wanted to talk a little about how we’ve approached the design of the framework.

  There’s no place like home

  I suspect a lot of frameworks are born out of a collection of ‘commonly used’ classes that the developer has in his toolbox. When you start to repeat the way you do things several times over, you naturally start forming common templates and processes that will speed this up for you. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it does mean that end-users who come to your framework often have to force themselves to work the same way as you do. And if there’s one thing we’ve identified – it’s that everyone codes differently! 🙂 This is especially true in JavaScript. To some the lack of OOP is a real issue, and they reintroduce it back into JS via external libs. Others really like using jQuery style method chaining and some even wrap their entire game up in one single massive function.

  The important thing is that they’re all different, and it was essential to us that we let you code your game in the way you want. So we’re not enforcing specific methods of coding on you when it comes to actually building your game. Internally within the framework we’re doing things in a very set way, and if you wish to get deep and dirty with plugins then you’ll need to follow our lead. But on the outside we’re making it as flexible as possible, so that you can approach the structure in a way you’re familiar with.

  Our design is driven by analysing games

  This may seem blindingly obvious, but in studying a huge number of frameworks over the years it strikes me that this doesn’t actually happen much! We’re building a game framework, so we want to be sure that the features it has are useful for games.

  In order to do this we sat down and went through a huge collection of games – from early Atari video games to modern iOS and console hits, and all kinds in-between. Sports games, RPG, action games, physics games, dungeon brawlers, racing and even Text Adventures. We picked 100 games initially, stripped away the story and drilled down specifically into the game mechanics and what would be required in order to successfully re-create it using our framework. This is a process we continue to do. By dissecting as many games as possible we’re finding lots of common mechanics that are helping prioritise our development roadmap.

  Here are some examples:

  Space Invaders

  You’ve a big group of aliens moving in sync, randomly firing at you. As the invaders fire at you (and you at them) there is pixel-level destruction of the bases. From this simple game it was clear we wanted our Group object to be flexible enough that we could apply a transform component to it, updating invaders at once. Our collision system should be able to support group to group collision and we’d need the ability to dynamically modify the base sprite image at run-time.

  Galaxians

  Very similar to Space Invaders, we’d take the same group abilities and then add Path support, so the galaxians can follow smooth paths curving down towards the player and shooting at him, rotating slightly as they go. This game would also require a bullet pool and bullet management system.

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