Slashie’s Keep is a 3D representation of my professional journey through game development. Instead of browsing projects in a chronological list, visitors can walk through a virtual keep where each floor represents a year of my career, filled with the games, prototypes, technologies, and collaborations that defined it. You can check it out at https://slashie.net/keep. This devlog documents one more step in that ongoing journey.
A small change for mobile was required in order to make the new minigame playable: the virtual joystick didn’t allow running, since that would require an additional button press in desktop. So I fixed it so that the joystick’s own travel became the throttle: nudge it and you walk, push it to the rim and you sprint, and the thumb lights up when you cross over. It reads much better than the old walk-or-nothing.
Then, there was the question of it only working in mobile for a phone held upright. This was brought to my attention by my daughter, when I challenged her to complete the newly added challenge. “If I could do this in my tablet, I would make it in 5 seconds”, sayeth her.
One fun thing I figured out was, support for a horizontal mode was already in… there was nothing really locking it to portrait mode. It was just my phone’s settings! But in any case I did some improvements to prevent the viewport for being cluttered in this mode.
I also removed the interact button since tapping on a thing in the scene already interacted with it, and it was getting on the way of the Jump button (which again, was pretty important for the platforming UX)
Additionally, there was the issue with the browser toolbar eats about a fifth of a sideways screen. So entering the Keep now asks for fullscreen, riding the same tap that starts everything else. On desktop too, now. This doesn’t work on iPhone Safari of course, because they hate web game devs.
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