Please help test Blaster!

[drhayes]

Play Blaster here.

 

I'm also writing a series of posts on how Blaster was made on my site. It's supposed to be a not-a-beginners tutorial, showing a game being made end-to-end.

 

Blaster is open source. Tear apart the source. File issues. Fork it!

 

I'd love feedback! On the game, on the tutorial, on the source – anything and everything! It's my first public game. My first WebGL game at all. I'm trying to gauge just how hard it is, what a good progression for the levels are... all that stuff.

[jmp909]

Hi,

 

thanks for the blog posts and sharing source.

 

Please could you explain how the arguments get injected eg https://github.com/drhayes/blaster/blob/part3/src/behaviors/tiltMove.js

 

where does entity actually get passed to this function from

update(entity) {    entity.angle = ANGLE_RATIO * entity.body.velocity.x;}

I'm assuming it's 'this'?

behavior[methodName](this, ...args);

[drhayes]

Sounds like it's time to update the blog post and tell my two mailing list subscribers about the update.

 

Yup, that's it. Here's a link with more context. The "behave" function passes along the entity as the first argument to call methods it calls, if they're present on the behavior.

 

Originally the behaviors ran in the context of the entity (more of a "behavior.apply(entity, args);" thing) but I found it very useful for the behaviors to maintain state instead of the entity. That means that I can just look at the behavior instance and see what matters to it rather than poking around in the entity properties. I don't have to worry that another behavior might overwrite some vital piece of state. I also don't have to namespace any behavior state; e.g. lots of Blaster behaviors re-use Point instances as "angleForMove" (or whatever)... they don't have to be "fleeCenterAngleFromMove" in this case.

 

It's also vaguely kind of if-you-squint ECS-ish.

[Mizukage]

Greate job. You should make it bigger product 

[chongdashu]

Great fun, I enjoyed it! I thought I had a good strategy (circling around the map), but was soon proven wrong in the later levels.

Also, I really enjoyed how you constantly surprise the player with new enemy types. Extremely compelling, well done.

I would love to read your write-up on this over the next few days.

 

One minor issue - I didn't click on instructions when I first loaded up the game (i know, i really should have), and was pretty much clueless how to move or attack (tried directional buttons and spacebar). Maybe showing instructions the first time the user starts a game? Might be annoying, too. 

 

Anyhow, nice work! 

[MichaelD]

Nice work, reached level 7 with no problem but was blasted to oblivion afterwards!

 

I noticed some polygon enemies where chilling on the bottom right corner and did nothing, add an arrow or something to compel the player to click on instructions maybe?

 

Thanks for sharing!

[drhayes]

Those pentagons are Assassins. They shoot a high velocity spear every five seconds. They flee to the corners when damaged.

 

I'm working on a smartbomb weapon for getting out of tight spots. Still testing, trying to balance it, see if I need to make more levels.

 

Right now there are 16 waves. According to my analytics, no one besides me has gotten past wave 12. I think the smartbomb could help people break that ceiling.

[Skeptron]

A multiplayer version of this would be THE shit. Agar.io would just die within seconds.

 

Thinking about doing any boss level?

[rgk]

Very nice game, I played games like this before. The only thing I can say was a bit annoying is the amount of health each enemy had, I would say slow down the rate of fire and add more enemies, and make each enemy like 1 shot or 2 shot..

[drhayes]

Multiplayer: I've heard this before and it sounds very interesting! That might have to wait for v2 of Blaster, but I promise I'm thinking about it. I haven't done any testing but I'm skeptical that TCP websockets bouncing through a server can provide real-time, action-oriented response times. WebRTC could maybe do it, but then I've got cheating problems.

 

I think the game would have to change a bit more to be fun: maybe more weapon types, maybe shields, stealth, that kind of thing. But it's very interesting.

 

Boss fight: holy shit that's an incredible suggestion. That might be next on the list after smartbomb! Thanks so much!

 

rgk: Thanks for the feedback. I'd got that exact suggestion before from codevinsky before; additionally, "What if there were more weapon types? Pistol, machine gun, etc." I played with it a bit (it's pretty easy to adjust the rate of fire, amount of bullet damage, and health of all the enemies). It completely changed the flow and feel of the game and I didn't enjoy it as much. That said, feel free to fork and deploy it! The documentation of the repo isn't so great, but I'm writing a series of articles about how I wrote the game that would help you modify it.

[drhayes]

"And we're out of beta / We're releasing on time."

 

Updated with more levels and a smartbomb, defaulting to the spacebar. Give it a whirl, see if anyone else can roll over the game.

 

As always, feedback welcome!

[Skeptron]

Wave 11. The bomb has a waaaay too short radius in my opinion, but its effect is really cool! 

 

Quick suggestion : you should put a link to your blog / game in your profile banner, it would be easier for us to get to the game (I see your post, boom I have the link right in your banner).

[drhayes]

Thanks for the suggestion; sig added.

 

You think it's short? It's about 1/6th of the playing field. That seemed huge to me. I'll play around with it later tonight, though, see how it changes things to make it bigger.

[Mizukage]

I died on wave 9 

[NZMikey]

19 waves then reset?  Should add a victory message at the end instead of the player repeating it

[drhayes]

Once someone gets past wave 12 I will. Still thinking about the boss fight idea, too.