Firstly I’d just like to let you know that the lack of posts lately is because I have a new full time job which I’m enjoying quite much so far, but it still means I have less time / motivation to write stuff. The unit testing series and other postings will continue (see how I didn’t say “next week”, but “next time” in part 5? ;) ), but probably on a bit slower schedule.
As for packageizer and few other things not working, that’s because I’m setting them up on a new server. They should be up soon’ish.
Now for the actual post!
Today I’ll talk a bit about my other popular JavaScript widget game, Opera Command. As you may have guessed, it’s a clone of Missile Command and I originally wrote it to run as an Opera Widget.
I recently modified it to run in other browsers, so you can try it out even if you don’t have Opera. There may be some issues regarding the Z, X and C keys being taken by the browser for other purproses but other than that it should work quite fine.
This game is technically less interesting and impressive than TankWar Online, but it bears a few things of note.
Opera Command is possibly the only one of my games with a small “story” – The little snippet about Redmondians attacking Norway you get when you open the game. Also, it had an online high score table, which no longer functions due to same reasons as TankWar’s online play. Some people had also figured out what the game does to post your score and had “hacked” it and posted fake scores…
As usual, the graphics are done using the canvas element and the menus are plain old HTML divs and stuff. Despite quite simple I like how the graphics turned out, as they kind of look “old school” and the game runs pretty well even on a bit slower PCs despite canvas being quite expensive speed-wise.
Some of the graphics are simple images drawn on the canvas, like the city graphics. Rest are drawn using the canvas methods. The explosions particularily are something that turned out surprisingly nice after a random try: They are simply circles that get larger and are filled with a gradient.
I still have one or two JavaScript games that might be worth a post. Perhaps we’ll see some in the future