[WIP] Fracas II: The Frackening

[aaryte]

http://cave2d.com/fracas2

This is a 2D twinstick maze shooter, for phones, tablets, laptops, etc, using WebGL for the (terrible) graphics.

It's still in progress, but completely playable on all platforms.

 

Controls: left side moves, right side shoots. wasd, ijkl, arrow keys, touchscreens, and keyboard+mouse all work.

 

 

 

This is my third game, but it's the first one playable on mobile. WebGL is now available on iPhones and iPads, with iOS 8, so I decided to learn it. This runs well enough on an iPad 2 in Safari. Android Nexus 5 and 7 are smooth in Chrome and Firefox. Desktops/laptop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) have no trouble at all AFAIK. I've never run it on IE, so it'll probably crash and burn there.

 

I tried 2D canvas on mobile, but it was never smooth enough on my iOS device, an iPad 2. Example: http://cave2d.com/test12/

But with WebGL, the bottleneck seems to be the JS - physics, rayscans, etc. Graphics are blazing fast.

 

I want to keep this project simple, so this is similar to my first web game, http://plexode.com/fracas. But I added some features to fix gameplay issues that bugged me:

 

Health was useless when you were already at full health, so I made it give you a powerup. Now staying at full health and getting powerups is the main winning strategy. (Eating health when 100% healthy is also the way to win the original Fracas, because it boosts your max health a little.)

 

If the enemies get some lucky hits in, you might die suddenly. So I made it harder to die, by slowing time down when you are on your last health, when enemies are near you and can see you. It changes the game a lot and I'm happy with how it turned out.

 

Enemies used to just chase you when they saw you, but it looked lame to have them suddenly lose interest when you turned a corner. Now when they see you they switch from "calm" to "excited" mode - they're faster, they chase you, and they run their control logic more frequently. They remember the last place they saw you, and don't resume wandering until they reach that place, or enough time goes by for them to return to calm mode. After they lose sight of the player, they take a few seconds to calm down, so it looks like they're searching for you. Seems OK.

 

Next up:

- Explosions and sparks. I did some shader-based explosions in an earlier test, http://cave2d.com/test16. I'll do something similar in Fracas 2.

- Basic sound effects, using WebAudio oscillators.

- Slightly better graphics for characters and objects.

- Better levels, and more of them.

 

This is my first post, so I don't know what to expect. I'm glad people care about HTML5 games, and I think HTML5 mobile game development is the new hotness. Now I'm rambling. Clicking "post!"