Object Lesson
RPG
This week in RPG I refactored the movement code from last week, creating 2 classes - one for Mobs and one for the Player. The Player class has no special functionality at all beyond what it inherits from the Mob yet. This gave me an opportunity to revisit some code I wrote a long time ago. When I knew nothing about javascript, I had some Mob and Player classes but the inheritance was borked. Back then, I solved this by simply copy-and-pasting the constructor from Mob into Player. Now I know better. I’ve seen extend() functions during my brief flirtation with javascript frameworks in the past, but I didn’t really understand what was going on or where they came from. Now I do!
Once I had things refactored and nice and neat, I made the Orc a Mob and gave him some very rudimentary intelligence. If you get too close, he’ll chase you! So awesome.
Next up I need to implement some special generator tiles that you can click on to ‘harvest’. Probably need some kind of inventory too, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
I also ended up spelunking in the rabbit hole of creating some lighting effects. I realised that any self-respecting RPG/survival horror game needs a day/night cycle.
I was able to make night, with a pretty simple change to the fragment shader, although actually passing the value in from javascript is a little more involved. creating independent light sources looks a little trickier though.
This spelunking also lead me to realise that I made a pretty stupid and large mistake with my depth code. I wrote some fairly funky-gymnastics-type-code in order to render different levels of the tilemap in a different order. What I realised is that I’m working with a graphics system designed for 3D rendering. All I really need to do is stop rendering everything at the same z-coordinate (I wanted it flat!!!), and the ‘3d-ness’ will take care of itself!
I wrote the original code for glixl over a year ago now, so I’ve forgotten most of what I learnt about WebGL. I’ll have a stab at re-writing things when I get some time to myself.
Pixel Art
I didn’t do any pixelling this week as I ended up quite busy. I did however justify all the time I spent on my little band when I came up with a great 1-shot lesson for a year 7 group I have using Scratch to create little bands and animate them.
I’ve noticed that this happens quite a lot - I play around with something interesting and after a couple of weeks it seeps into my teaching, making my lessons more fun.
At least, that’s how I’ll justify my procrastination when the OFSTED Inquisitors come knocking…
Meatspace
I found my way back to the gym this week for some swimming. Aren’t I a good boy.