Presenting Kiflea: a 2D-based canvas game engine

General Discussion

Presenting Kiflea: a 2D-based canvas game engine

skerit
Friday, July 23, 2010 - 15:08

Hi everyone,

I always wanted to learn JavaScript and write a game, so last week I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and have a go at it.
I've been working on it pretty much non-stop. Only sleep, work and food got in the way (and I even forgot that last one a few times)

Of course: it's not so much a game as it is an engine. I want to write it as reusable as possible.

Having said that there is an example you can try out, it's here:

http://kipdola.be/subdomain/kiflea-working/

(It starts with a shot being fired and an explosion following, that's the test code for effects)
You can click around on the map and another avatar will find a path towards it and walk there. Do not click somewhere unreachable, though. It currently keeps on lucking until it dies :P
I've also done some basic HUD work. You can click a character and see how much life it has. You can click your own healthbar and get some more life.

Sorry: you can't kill anything yet.

All in all, I'm quite happy with my progress, especially because I've never really touched JavaScript before or written a game. It's the most fun I've had all year.

You can download the source from my repository here:

http://kipdola.be/trac/repos/

Any feedback, ideas, patches, ... they're all very welcome!

bart
joined 13 years 7 months ago
Friday, July 23, 2010 - 17:15
bart's picture

Hi!

Very nice work, particularly on the pathfinding. :)

I'm running Firefox 3.6.4 on Fedora 13, and there are 3 issues that jump out at me:

  • It looks like when you switch frames in the sprite animation, the old frame sometimes shows up below the new one, giving it kind of a trail effect.
  • I have to press the arrow key repeatedly to move.
  • Your z-ordering with entities is off.  You probably want to sort your entities by ascending Y value before you draw them.

Peace,

Bart

 

skerit
joined 14 years 6 months ago
Friday, July 23, 2010 - 17:31

Thanks for the feedback :)
I actually was quite amazed at the simplicity of the pathfinding algorithm, I thought it would take me a few days to get it to work but it was only a few hours. Though I still have to switch from the Dijkstra algorithm to the A* one.

  • The repeated key-pressing is indeed annoying. Apparently, in windows a keydown event in javascript is fired constantly, whereas in Linux it's only fired once. (However, the same isn't true for Chrome, where it IS continuous).
    I actually just have to use a keypress and that would fix it. (I'm running Ubuntu, so I actually have the same problem :P I'm only debugging it in Chrome because it's so lightning fast in there)
  • I believe what you're seeing isn't a ghost of the old layer, but of 2 layers not being in sync. See: my objects can have multiple layers on top of each other, but I think they get out of sync sometimes. I should fix that next.
  • What entities are you talking about? The characters? Because everything else is all layers with tiles.
    You can have as many layers as you want, this map has a ground layer, a walking layer and a tree layer. But to test things I actually put a few stones on the tree layer, so that's why your head is sticking under them :P
    You can open the maps up in tiled and take a look at them, if you will :)
    But it's indeed confusing, I'll edit the map!

Thanks!