The game jam comes to an end and I’m submitting my progress.

Day 5 was largely spent studying the nuances of the ThreeJS Sprite class in preparation for adding spritesheet support to my prototype. I realized I was confused about the various coordinate systems, so I spent a couple hours working everything out so I could draw a reference diagram.

On Day 6 (Wednesday) I rewrote my sprite class as it made more sense to me in 2024 than it did in 2014 😅, and decided not to rewrite the Viewport class because it sort of already worked. I decided to punt on the original world unit scale of 1cm to 1 “world scale” pixels when I realized that the textures would be enormous. Faking stuff is just fine for a prototype!

It was then time to finally do artwork, which I was looking forward to and also dreading because my game art workflow needs to be built again from scratch, as I’ve finally ditched Adobe Creative Cloud and am committed to finding better value. I looked at a few DeluxePaint II clones, then decided to try Procreate and Affinity Photo on the iPad. I made a sprite I could use for the maze wall and got some idea how these tools worked.

After that, it was time to import the maze wall sprite into ThreeJS. Using the notes from early in the day, I wrote a skeleton spritesheet for the maze wall to test my knowledge, and it worked fine. I will later make an SNA_SpriteSequence class that inherits from SNA_Sprite.

Lastly, to get some semblance of interaction I spent the last few hours of the day hacking-in a rudimentary control system that uses the WASD keys. There are no physics at all, so I just implemented an Euler-based heading and speed system that it really janky. I then spent a bit of time tuning the motion of the stars (also janky and hacked) and also the rates themselves which are sadly framerate-dependent. But hey, I can sort of fly through the maze now and imagine what to build on top of the basic idea.

Overall, a successful first jaunt, I think, into making little video games for the web using my own framework. I have 2D artist workflow, modular architecture, and an updated code base that should be easy to expand! Toward the last few days, I was very pleased how easy it was to add/subtract test code.

Now…how to figure out the actual submission process so I can go to sleep!