Concept:
My concept this week is “SURVIVE”. It is an interactive video game in which the player is a triangle located at the cursor and the objective is to avoid incoming projectiles RGB colored projectiles. The text at the top includes a timer and a health counter. The timer is 30 seconds long, if the user survives for the amount of time without losing all his/her health the game displays a “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” page. If the player loses all his Health before the timer runs out then the game will display a “GAME OVER” screen.
Embedded:
Code:
In this week’s assignment, I had 2 main issues, which were keeping track of time and managing the projectile collision. The first snippet is the method I used to keep track of time. I discover a setinterval() function in js which allows the user to set a specific amount of time in order to increment, which I set to 1000 ms or 1s. I created another function that counts down the timer and displays a console message when the timer ran out for debugging purposes. I then used the timer variable to dictate what happens in the game.
The collision aspect was interesting because it requires precision or else the player experience for the game would not be great. I created 2 functions that calculated the triangle area and checked whether the inputted coordinates are within that triangle. In order to make this work for the cursor triangle, I inputted the coordinates of 3 points surrounding the cursor which combined make up a triangle. This allowed me to get precise collision detections for the triangle which is located on the cursor.
Future Improvements:
There are quite a lot of improvements that can be made to this assignment. For example, I can add different levels which scale in difficulty. The difficulty would be dictated by the speed of the incoming projectiles as well as the number of them. Another way is to have the speed of the projectiles scale with the timer, and there would be a points system based on the timer as well. This setup is similar to how the classic game Tetris works in which the longer the player lasts the higher their score. Adding sound effects would also enhance the player’s overall experience as well. This assignment has the potential to be a fully-fledged game in the future.