[WIP] Ghost House in Demon Country - a point-n-click RPG

[ryoshenron]

Ghost House in Demon Country

 

 

I have recently put up a brief demo of the RPG I have been working on using the Crafty.js library. This is an 8-bit-style RPG that is being designed with play on a mobile device in mind, and has an entirely point-and-click interface in which you don't have to move around your character, but simply touch/click things you want to interact with like in the old first-person point-and-click adventure games. It also features turn-based battles like the old NES RPGs such as Dragon Quest. The art style is inspired mostly by Earthbound Zero (Mother) and the NES Final Fantasy titles.

 

This demo is not yet set up properly for playing on most mobile browsers, but I might put up a mobile version of the demo soon for testing purposes. So far the game runs correctly in the latest Chrome and Firefox, but does not display correctly in Internet Explorer (I have not yet figured out how to prevent IE from smoothing out the pixel art graphics when the game is scaled up), though it should still be playable in IE.

 

I have not added audio or game saving yet, but this demo is so short that saving your game won't be necessary.

 

I basically just want a bit of feedback to see if anyone thinks this could be a fun and interesting game worth the effort or not.

 

And finally, here is the demo: http://ryoshenron.com/ghost-house-demo/index.html

 

A little background on myself: I have been a hobbyist game developer since around 2008, when I started working on my first Flash game. Since then, I made several games in Flash before then trying my hand in mobile game development by making a native Android-only game utilizing the Andengine, called Panic in Zombie Town, which I released on Google Play for free. Looking for something to code my games in that is more cross-platform, I had recently decided to move over to HTML5 game development, and this will be my first game in that platform.

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at my little project.

[Rune]

This looks awesome!

 

Also, good to see another Illinoisan around here.

[Gustavgb]

Look's really great! Excited to see the game when you're done

[Antylum]

 

 

 but does not display correctly in Internet Explorer (I have not yet figured out how to prevent IE from smoothing out the pixel art graphics when the game is scaled up)

 

I think, IE still doesn't support the specification, msImageSmoothingEnabled. Same problem, here is what I found it(from http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/1342-nearest-neighbour-resizing-for-pixelart/):

 

I thought about approach to scale pixelart during game loading and initialization, using getImageData && putImageData, so you create new image depending on player's screen resolution. Pros is that you write nearest-neigbour algorithm, which scales correct without smoothing(or how you have written it). Cons is that can take a while, cause put/getImageData are slow and if your game has many images.

Luckily, i found a good article about this approach and much more. I recommend it to all:

    http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/drawing-pixels-is-hard

 

 

 

You can take code from this article.

[ryoshenron]

I think, IE still doesn't support the specification, msImageSmoothingEnabled. Same problem, here is what I found it(from http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/1342-nearest-neighbour-resizing-for-pixelart/):

 

 

 

You can take code from this article.

 

Yeah I've read that "Drawing Pixels is Hard" article. Since I'm using Crafty, I don't know what method the engine uses to draw images to the screen when I use it's sprite creation functions. I remember reading somewhere that IE 11 finally added proper support for imageSmoothingEnabled, so I should upgrade my IE 10 to 11 and see if everything works right on there. It would be great if it does.