So, I decided on a whim to ‘enter’ Ludum Dare 22 (48?). I didn’t really do it “right”, only putting in a few hours work here and there, but I did finish off a simple game “alone”. Its based off my experiences as a kid (and adult, I guess). Upon reflection on the idea of being alone, I recalled when I was younger and felt very isolated. I wasn’t exactly anti-social (just happened to not have invested time into interaction, instead preferring to read books and play videogames). I was often informed that people actually liked me (I found that hard to believe), and that if I wanted friends, all I had to do was talk to them. Yes, talking, one of the easiest things in the world to do (spoiler alert: I didn’t do a lot of talking back then … still don’t). Even then, people would try to talk to me and I really had to work to keep myself alone.
So that’s what this game is about. The process of keeping yourself alone by putting up walls to keep potential friends away.
I made the game using “HTML5″ and easel.js. Javascript is interesting, as I seem to sometimes fall into a different scope without realizing it. In addition, the keyboard events leave a little bit to be desired (keyup events are sometimes lost, presumably when too many keys are down). I hope that gets sorted out (especially considering there is already a gamepad api in the dev builds of Chrome and Firefox). Easel.js was wonderful in providing some nice helper functions to the canvas, though it leaves a bit to be desired. Notably lacking is a width & height attribute on the DisplayObject or Bitmap level (it looks like you CAN get to it through the image reference on the bitmap… a bit ugly looking).