Js13kGames is a JavaScript coding competition for JavaScript Game Developers. The fun part of the compo is the file size limit set to 13 kilobytes. The competition started on 13th August and ended on 13th September 2021. The theme for 2021 was SPACE.
I managed to participate in the competition for the fifth time in a row, this year I teamed up with fellow game jammers and friends: mapedorr and QuietGecko, as agar3s went lone-wolf with his entry for the decentralized category.
We ended up creating a cute space exploration arcade game. You can play online here. Source code is here. There’s a gameplay video here.
My main inspiration, in the end, was “Tokyo 2020 Google Doodle Champion Island Games”, a fun little game made by a company called “Google” for this year’s Olympics. I wanted to recreate its feeling of relaxed quest-completing gameplay with challenging minigames.
The Story
I wanted to do something simple this year, but I also wanted to start as quick as possible so that there was something we could polish along the way instead of rushing it thru the end.
When the theme was announced I immediately thought of the idea of a space exploration sim; however I also thought it would be a common approach, given how easy it might be to exploit procedural generation to create infinitely expanding, boring universes with thousands of planets. I decided instead to have a more focused world, with unique planets, characters and quests, using procgen only for non-critical content (such as the stars in the background, and the random asteroid fields). Everything else was to be made manually, quest types would be sparsely reused, and tied to a hand-written story line.
The theme of cute visuals and audio was also something I thought from the start, maybe I just wanted to make a cute game for my daughter, or I thought the visuals could be easily adapted to vector illustrations without yielding quality, and the nature of the sound tools we could use for the jam worked very well for the type of audio that would support these visuals.
What Went Right
We ended up with a solid, finished entry with nice visuals and audio, and hopefully a fun and challenging experience with some interesting story moments.
What Went Wrong
While I still haven’t received feedback from the community, I don’t think anything went particularly wrong.
One thing I really wish I have had the time (and the bytes) to implement, was the additional game mode focused in building your home in a lonely planed, spaced away from civilization. The idea was for it to be the game mode you would unlock for the web monetization category. Maybe I should have implemented the roots of it along with the core gameplay, so that it wasn’t left out in the end (but then maybe that would have prevented me from filling the core content first, since we did run out of SPACE in the end).
The mobile controls could also be improved with more iteration on it, so that the players could shut down the engine more easily while turning the ship at the same time.
The DevLog
Day 1
The theme for this year was SPACE. I had an initial idea on my head of making a simple educational simulator, with a cute children theme, showing a journey from Earth to Moon of a multistage rocket.
I decided to use my entry from 2018 as a starting point, and started fiddling around with some “lander” physics and a simple camera that could go back and forth (Duet of Aces was forward only).
Day 2
I changed my mind about trying to make it physics based. Went in a more “arcade” route by removing gravity and also implemented open movement in all directions. Did some work in the rockets so they exploded after some time instead of only upon impact, as I thought the player would have to make his way thru asteroid fields and aliens in the open space by timing the rocket explosions.
Day 3
The idea now was for the player to travel to the planets to find the fragments of the song, (a multi-track song in the background would only play the tracks for the instruments you had found already).
To make this possible for the player, I added the navigation pointer at the bottom, and allowed switching waypoints.
As QuietGecko jumped on board, I also set up ZZSFXR, since there was music and sounds to be added.
The plan was to populate the empty space with aliens and asteroid fields. But aliens should behave more like animals than enemies, you had to push them away.
I also increased the resolution of the game to cover all the window (but this was eventually kind of rolled back.)
Day 4
I managed to integrate some test music and sound effects, including troubleshooting an issue with the ZZFXM web tracker exporter.
Day 5
I improved vector objects rendering, replacing my own path rendering functions from 2018 into using Path2D directly, which was a great step to allow more complex quadratic / bezier paths, as well as save a big chunk of code. I also did some foundations for the conversation system and drew some “test” objects (spoiler: some of them stood until the very end).
I used MiniSVGcreator by xem, it was great to produce optimized SVG paths (although by this point its usefulness was limited by its inability to save/load)
Day 6
Decided that the game would be about finding your missing friends instead of completing a song, and made a basic structure for this questline (hoping from planet to planet looking for them)
Also added asteroid fields serving as obstacle for your planet-hoping journey.
For the visuals, I added a parallax effect with cute stars and reused the pseudo 3d effect when turning from Duet of Aces. QuietGecko continued working in the audio.
Day 7
Sent a small patch to xem’s MiniSVGCreator to allow loading SVG data (to improve the art workflow), also added new music tracks from the gecko, and worked on the plotline to have an idea of how much text I’d be able to fit.
Day 8
I had to travel to fetch some hardware, but managed to do some airplane coding implementing conversations with multiple fragments, word wrap for text, and a lot of writing for the dialogs and plot (measuring how much is viable to add inside the limits, because text taxes you HEAVILY in js13k!).
Day 9
Added rocket particle effects, hints to friend locations, and city labels. Also integrated more test conversations.
So far I had a huge JS file with all on it, so I decided to split it into modules and modify the gulpfiles to merge them at build time.
Day 10
Asteroid mining with minirockets. Character portraits composition with test cat, dog, and fox.
Day 11
Integrated new SFX by the gecko and added mobile controls and scaling.
Day 12
Worked on quests (for mining and space racing) and speed booster powerups. The idea was that you would have to complete some quests to get hints to your friends’ locations.
Day 13
Implemented the “time trial” quest, including improving the obstacles track, and adding boosters to it.
Also worked further in the mobile controls, and added scoring to the game, based on how long it took you to complete it.
Day 14
Focused on a better user experience, by improving space navigation tying it to the current known location of friends instead of all the planets in the universe, as well as adding some onboarding and hints
Mapedorr jumped into the game designing some nice portraits, I did an initial test integration for them.
Day 15 and 16
Implemented space fishing and Galaxian fishing quest.
Days 17 and 18
As the end drew near, I called for friends to help test and did a lot of small fixes and tweaks in the mining and fishing, and also improved responsiveness for mobile.
We were already over the 13KB limit, so had to call for help on the js13k slack. I was pointed to ECT which was a last-minute life-saver.
SFX and Music were also revamped by the gecko.
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