I am very proud to share a 2D platformer I created that is to be played in the browser, although with the help of Electron it might be a more portable thing. For now please visit https://cd-game.aninternetpresence.net to play it and let me know your thoughts.
I have been calling it Carbuncle Duplex, which is a kind of play on words inspired by the catalyst for all this, which is an impressive work of pixel art to be found in a spritesheet called Simple broad-purpose tileset. Phrases like “simple pimple” and “simple pimples” are used to refer to the image files, and it just kind of caught on.
Most of the music is from an artist who goes by the screen name BloodPixelhero on freesound.org. Sites like OpenGameArt and Freesound are amazing places you simply must visit. A lot of people share incredible works of art that they’ve put a lot of heart and soul into. You can get lost in other peoples’ worlds, created to help inspire your own creations. It’s magical visiting such places, imagining the worlds that can be created from such art, and then actually trying to create those experiences.
On the Carbuncle Duplex site, scroll down to find instructions on how to play and notes on how I made it. Long story short, I used Phaser so as to finally fulfill my lifelong dream of making a browser-based game. It is quite a nice game engine and worth the time to learn. Phaser has a ton of tutorials and examples, but be sure to read Phaser by Example because it beautifully ties important information together that is found in all the separate learning material.
I’ll likely have more to say about JavaScript in another post, but I urge you to dive into it if you have not because it has evolved over time in impressive ways. Back in the day, it was hard to find accurate resources about it, but now it is hard to find inaccurate resources about it. At the very least, save this public YouTube playlist and watch the first Douglas Crockford video to get an idea of how things were back in the day. His way of thinking paved the way for JavaScript becoming a very versatile thing and not just being confined to web browsers.
The game I made is a very short but I hope fun and playable thing. I’d love to expand on it as time goes on. There’s a lot of quirky mechanics that may be amusing to some degree, but I will likely fix/optimize some things like the moving platforms and the magic attacks.
This is quite the next level for me. I made my first unity game starting with a tutorial that I expanded on. In this case, of course examples, guides and tutorials helped me initiate with how I would go about it, but I eventually found a very satisfying groove and was able to just push ahead. It ain’t exactly Cave Story, so don’t expect to be blown out of your seat. If anything, I hope it’s not very buggy and that it is an enjoyable experience when you give it a try.
