Looking back on 2015

2015 was the year of Letter for Mimi 2, which was a success in my eyes. During this year I also finally made the switch from Flash to HTML5 and started working on Letter for Mimi 3. As explained in a previous post, doing the switch and starting a new major project turned out to be a bit overambitious. I have been more active on social media this year, utilising my Twitter more and asking YouTube Let’s Players to play Letter for Mimi 2. Besides that, I was also able to put up at least one post on this blog every month! All in all a good year if you ask me. 2016 will see the release of my first HTML5 game, so that is something for us all to look forward too!

Pico8

I have recently discovered Pico8, it is a cool little OS that is based around a 128×128 screen and LUA coding. I played some games and thought it would be cool if I could create an adventure game for it. After reading forum posts and the manual it turns out the licensing is a bit crooked; seems like the owner of the Pico8 engine can always claim your game idea. Besides legal issues there is also a limitation on the amount of code you can use to write a game: the cartridges can be 32k at max. Programming short functional code can be quite difficult! Anyhow, you can play games for free on the website without buying the Pico8 engine, I think I’ll leave it at that.

Letter for Mimi 3 – Refactoring windows

I have been working on refactoring the code for generating the in-game windows and then replacing all the old code with the new ones. Due to the lack of experience with writing proper JavaScript code, I made some design errors which have to be fixed before continuing. Besides that, the code is now based around the adventure part of the game, while the core battle mechanics haven’t been properly written yet. It would have been better to start with the battle mechanics and then work out the rest of the game, in order to get a minimum viable product. Letter for Mimi 3 is a rather ambitious project, and perhaps I need to get my JavaScript game up by making a few smaller games first.

Letter for Mimi 3 – incomplete battle animation

Letter for Mimi 3 battle animation

Getting used to Phaser takes a lot of time, and while I am programming the game I am discovering better practices for style and coding, so I might need to start refactoring soon. I have made a list of features that I want to implement in Letter for Mimi 3, one of which includes multiplayer battles. A lot of basic stuff has to be programmed first, such as the battles (at the moment you can only ‘attack’ as can be see in the gif above). We’ll have to see if the more ambitious features will make it into episode 3. The idea of the feature list is to distil it into product milestones and then make a planning. I don’t want to work on this game for a year like I did with Letter for Mimi 2, so I want to make a tight planning to help develop everything in a couple of months. I read that Zeboyd games made Breath of Death VII in four months (part-time), so I want to make the game in a time span similar to that. I am aiming for an hour of gameplay, so that should be realistic!