Author Archives: Andy

Can't sing, can't dance, can handle a sword a little.

Game music: SanctuaryRPG

SanctuaryRPG Banner

Mechanized dragon.

Sometimes it’s the little things that pique your interest, tickle your funny bone or prompt a sudden perception test. In the case of SanctuaryRPG the little thing was the phrase “Mechanized dragon”. Any game that has that as a boss fight gets two automatic thumbs up in my book. Or talons as the case may be.

SanctuaryRPG is part Nethack, part Final Fantasy, all text. The website is immediately arresting, probably the slickest, most advanced-looking text-based site I’ve ever seen. The soundtrack by Rafael Langoni Smith matches perfectly, a wonderful throwback to the best of the NES. Worth a listen and worth some of your gold pieces and/or credits.
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Little dots of fear: Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation - Motion Scanner

As more details about Alien Isolation come skittering out of vents and leaping on our unsuspecting bodies I’ve gone from cynical to curious to cautiously optimistic, and now thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun’s hands-on I’m outright excited.
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Should I be excited by a Doom 4 teaser? Probably not, but I am anyway

Cyberdemon

id Software is barely recognisable from the team that made the original Doom, but given how badly they’ve fared with their last few games maybe that’s a good thing. Regardless, the teaser trailer they’ve put out for Doom 4 – or DOOM as they’re calling it – tells us little. Darkness! Mars! A demon! Poor weather conditions!

Teaser below…
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Conway’s Game of Life

Conway Banner

I love Conway’s Game of Life and I’ve made a version in pretty much every language I’ve ever learned, including QBasic. So a Javascript implementation was pretty much inevitable…

This was my first time bringing in HTML elements outside the canvas to control the simulation, and I also integrated a third-party slider component from DHTMLX.


While we’re on the subject of Mirror’s Edge…

Mirror's Edge small

…how about this rather nice Mirror’s Edge cityscape by MichalKus?


Fun with graph theory: Wilson’s Algorithm

Wilson Banner

The mini javascript projects continue apace. Today’s little program: an implementation of Wilson’s Algorithm.
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Mirror’s Edging Closer

Mirror's Edge 2 Banner

It was a year ago at E3 2013 that Electronic Arts officially announced a sequel to Mirror’s Edge to a mixed response of relief, elation, concern and frustration. The first game was born in 2008, that brief moment in time when EA was experimenting a bit, branching out and trying new things, a year that gave us Mass Effect, Spore, Warhammer, Dark Space, and of course Mirror’s Edge. Despite inevitable quirks the free-running gameplay garnered a lot of love. In fact the main complaint about the game was how unnecessary and counter-productive the combat was. EA might have been sticking their neck out but they couldn’t bring themselves to dial the combat down any further, which is a crying shame.

So when the 2013 E3 trailer heavily featured fighting joy was heavily tempered by disappointment. Had EA and DICE learned nothing?

A year has passed, another E3 has come, and some more Mirror’s Edge news has wall-run out of the studio and leapt wildly onto the internet. So what difference has a year made?
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Farewell, Simon D’souza

Journey Down 2

I only just heard that Simon D’souza – musician, composer and all round nice-guy – recently passed away. I know him best for his work on the Journey Down soundtrack, and Theo Waern has written a moving piece about him.

Farewell Simon, the world is a darker place for your passing.


“Bubbles” canvas tutorial part 3: Getting touchy

HTML5 Bubbles 4

So far in this series we’ve set up a basic framework to get us started and then added a render loop and some actual bubbles.

This part will make the game interactive, adding mouse and touch input, and discussing some of the pitfalls that can crop up as you do so.
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“Bubbles” canvas tutorial part 4: Getting noisy

HTML5 Bubbles 5

Now we’ve got graphics, animation and interactivity, what’s left? In this final part of my HTML5 javascript/canvas tutorial we finish off our little game by adding some sound effects – what good is popping bubbles without the satisfying sounds of destruction? Unfortunately, adding audio is far trickier than it has any rights to be, so hopefully this tutorial will save at least one person the troubles I had to go through.
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