Nebula Jalopy postmortem

The Dream Arcade Archive jam seemed like a good excuse to make a pure arcade action game.  I didn’t use the entirety of the time -- I didn’t really feel like the project deserved a week’s worth of time stolen from my core work projects.

I didn’t explore any fundamental new code or web development concepts, but the idea I had was a little more challenging than usual from a programming standpoint.  I took the permanent particle concept from Haywire Island and made a spaceship out of parts that could be parented to other parts with specified X and Y offsets.  This let me randomly move and resize multi-part segments of the ship on the fly, which I thought would be funny and also add some randomness to the level of bullet-dodging challenge.

The bullet patterns are pure RNG, and I know this probably isn’t the most satisfying way to do it, but googling stuff about Javascript already exposes me to a lot more righteously-framed advice than I can really tolerate.  I had no interest in diving into threads of shmup orthodoxy.

I’m very happy with the way the nebula effect turned out.  I re-purposed a trick I learned from some Dwitter post years ago -- not this one (https://www.dwitter.net/d/9906) but an earlier, similar one I can’t find now.  It uses offset canvas redraws to make really nice organic-looking color smears.  There’s a hidden canvas where the nebula is being generated and drawn at much a lower resolution, and every frame a slice of it is blown up to display in the main game window.

I made a single sound effect using BFXR, which is a nice tool if you want your video game to sound like a video game.  I learned about the archive YouTube maintains of songs and SFX that are available to use for videos (https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/) and grabbed a suitably synthy track to use as background music.  I’ve got to find a way to get myself more interested in the audio for these things.