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Thing A Week 1 - Professor Rex VonScience Saves The World (an HTML5/JavaScript game)

So, the first Thing A Week project was kind of a failure.

My goal was to build my first HTML5/JavaScript based game. I started out by picking a JS game framework suggested by my buddy Bryan. I ended up using Crafty and getting started with this tutorial. It was really good and by the end I had a top down adventure game thing that looked very Zelda-like.

From there I sat down and did a bit of planning to figure out what sort of game I wanted to make. This is where I may have gotten a bit ambitious. I decided to make a top down adventure game (similar to the one in the tutorial) about a T-rex/scientist who must fight off mammals and time travelers to gather parts to build a spaceship and blow up the asteroid that will cause the mass extinction of all dinosaurs. I planned out 4 stages, each with new mobs and planned to hand draw all the sprite fames.

Perhaps I was in a bit over my head, having never built a game before.

In the end, I was able to create a rather buggy game where you can move around a dark green square in a forest (made of light green squares) and go after gray squares (the parts!) while avoiding some brown squares (probably a rodent of some kind?). I wouldn’t really call it a game, but I suppose I know a lot more about game building with JavaScript than I did last week. I did really like the idea for the game, especially the name “Professor Rex VonScience” and I got to draw several dinosaurs wearing a lab coat and a bow tie, so it wasn’t a total loss.

If you’d like to “play” the “game” you can take a look here: Professor Rex VonScience Saves The World and the code is available on my Github.

So, now that I’ve already had an unsuccessful Thing A Week week, I need to figure out how to deal with failure in the project. I’d like to keep working on this game but I’d also like to avoid sticking with the same project several weeks in a row, particularly this early. Perhaps in an upcoming week I’ll pick a subset of this game as my project and work from there now that I have a better idea about the kind of work it takes to make a game. I’m also not sure if I’m ready to set next week’s project yet. I’m leaning towards building a bass distortion pedal, though.