Posts tagged with games

Monument Valley

Jul 02, 2015 in games, thoughts
Waterfall

So I finally got around to buying Monument Valley and playing through it (and the extra level pack, “Forgotten Shores”) and I have to say I’m really enamoured with it. I’ve always loved weird perspective-distorting images (I had a book of Escher engravings as a kid that I studied obsessively) and I found the game itself totally charming. Also, why has nobody had this idea before? It’s genius. Actually, perhaps somebody has had this idea before. In which case, why haven’t I heard of them?

For those not in the know: Monument valley is a game for mobile devices where you navigate Ida, the princess, through Escher-like impossible constructions and beautiful architecture. It’s available for iOS and Android and costs 4 dollars. This is the game’s website.

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A couple days ago I posted a little level editor that I made using Javascript and the <canvas> tag. Today I’m going to discuss how I did that. I’m basically discussing my learning experience here. I’m not really sure who is going to find this useful, to be honest, but I’m going for it anyway.

So first we obviously have to set up our canvas. I decided to make mine 256x256 pixels, and divide it into eight tiles per side. This makes the tiles 32x32 pixels.

<canvas width="256" height="256" id="can">you don't support canvas</canvas>

This creates a blank 256x256 canvas with a transparent background whose ID is “can.” The text inside the tag is what shows up to people whose browsers don’t support the tag.

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Fun With Canvas

Jun 24, 2015 in games, computers

Recently, I’ve been trying to get away from using Flash to make games. It seems like a relic from a bygone era. As such, I probably need to start learning to write games in HTML5 or something. Today, I’m messing around with the <canvas> tag.

But unfortunately you aren’t using a browser that supports the canvas tag. That’s too bad.


It's a little level editor, implemented in 44 lines of Javascript. (And it could be less if I shrunk it down.) Granted, I used jQuery for some of it, and it doesn't do very much, but I doubt I could have done much better in Flash. And, unlike Flash, this thing has the advantage of being cross-platform. So I think this is pretty nice.

You select which thing you want to place using the buttons at the bottom, then click on the image to place that tile in that place. If you want to save your level for some reason, you can right-click on the canvas element and hit 'save image.'

I may discuss later how I built this. I will also make some more weird canvas experiments. Wish me luck!