Hoverbattles Released (and more)

I've gone off on a tangent recently and been playing around with games development as if I was 15 again

I think I'm going to make a game that I actually want people to play next, but first up - three things I've released recently

Hoverbattles

My flagship 'game', something I've learned a lot from these past couple of months - written with a NodeJS back-end, with WebGL front-end, the code is awful in places and I think I have a few memory leaks (or third party libs do!) but I'm pretty much done with this now.

Note: The server this is on is not brill, so there will be lag

This can be found at http://hoverbattles.com - fill your boots.

Source can be found at https://github.com/robashton/HoverBattles

Plane Thinking

I coded this over a few days as warm-up for LD22, the 48 hour games development challenge, this is plain old Canvas (although I was playing with using WebGL to do progressive enhancement it turns out that copying buffers between the two gets expensive quickly and I didn't take it much further

This should work in most browsers, I really should make the effort to get it working with touch controls as it would work well on iPad

This can be played at http://planethinking.heroku.com/

Source can be found at https://github.com/robashton/plane-thinking

You don't have to be alone

This is my entry to the 48 hour game development competition Ludum Dare - I don't really think of this as competing with anybody else, trying to build a game from scratch over 48 hours is mega hard and I'm really proud that I was able to pull it off with plot, sound, music and alternative ending galore

The code for this is ... suboptimal, if you play it on anything other than a really high end desktop computer in any other browser than Chrome then do so at your peril. I'll be learning from that in my next game and making an effort to keep those render calls down

The game can be found at: http://ld22-ashton.heroku.com/

The source can be found at: https://github.com/robashton/ld48_22

The point of all this

Games development is complicated, the code in Hoverbattles is probably the most complex domain I've ever worked on, and finding ways to keep the accidental complexity low whilst keeping the technical complexity low at the same time was a big challenge

I've learned a lot by stepping away from ordinary business app development, and I'll be taking that back to the workplace with me, as well as carrying on in this space - never before has there been a better time for aspiring games development to noodle on in their spare time.

This site? Yeah I've messed this up a bit - I need to rip all these posts out and deploy them as static content and set up some re-directs, a project for a rainy weekend when I don't want to play with games :-)

Merry Xmas

Rob