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Review my HTML5 game (nuclearcarrot.com)

18 points by andy_boot ↗ HN
I noticed the standard of most HTML5 games is quite low. The only popular shoot em up out there was Crystal Galaxy and while it looks pretty I dont think its much fun to play. So I wrote my own. Uses graphics from the open Tyrian project.

Any feedback welcome.

10 comments

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[dead] andy_boot
I noticed the standard of most HTML5 games is quite low. The only popular shoot em up out there was Crystal Galaxy and while it looks pretty I dont think its much fun to play. So I wrote my own. Uses graphics from the open Tyrian project.

Any feedback welcome.

askhader
edit: perhaps you should change 'cursors' to 'arrow-keys' or some variant in the instructions.
coryl
Looked great! Maybe you can write up a post or article about how you made it?
rje
I'd love to hear some more details about the design decisions you made and any performance tradeoffs you ran into.

Otherwise, it's a great start. Some things you might consider:

* Better explosions. You can get pretty good effects with expanding/contracting colored circles, or using an animated sprite. I'm not sure what would be more efficient in html5. For an example check out the explosions in http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-mon...

* Reduce the size of the player's collision box. Most 'bullet hell' shooters actually use a box much smaller than the player sprite to give the player a bit of leeway as they try to dodge bullets.

* There's a pretty big size mismatch between the player and the enemies, maybe even that out a bit? The small enemies are cool because you can have a lot in a wave, but as a player the small enemies felt frustratingly hard to hit sometimes.

* Bullet image sprites. Guessing there's a performance issue here but I thought I'd suggest it anyways just in case you haven't tried it. A nice bullet sprite will make enemy bullets easier to read and easier for the player to dodge.

ramblerman
very nicely done. I agree with the last part of this comment. The enemy bullets are a little off.

The player laser beam is awesome :P

cabalamat
It's an inspiring demo of what can be done in HTML5. Also a fun game.
svenson
Impressive! Was really surprised at how little it taxed my system, usually I see my CPU graph shoot straight up. Would love to know how you optimized it as that's the biggest drawback with most HTML5 games I play.
namdnay
To be honest, I prefer your "Cat & Mouse"...
andy_boot
Hey thanks for he feedback everyone.

Design decisions: Dont rotate images - this really kills performance.

Try not to scale images - My rough performance tests said: draw 1 scaled image = draw 3 images.

As you guessed, Bullet images sprites were not done for performance reasons. I might try and add them again and see what it looks like.

I'll experiment with bigger enemies / explosion images / collision box changes.

I'll write up an article in the future covering my decisions in more detail. And yes I hate it when HTML5 games kill my CPU I was going to make sure this one didn't do that.

andy