I want to make sure this isn’t just a “review” game for people that already know the language. I want people to be able to use it to learn new vocab and grammar as well. The game as it is now is pretty much impossible if you don’t already know the words, so I’m working on a study screen that will take the form of a no-pressure bottle shooting minigame.
I put some work into a nicer looking title screen with some shambling zombie animations. All the artwork came from the indie bundle I bought a few weeks ago.
Lots of code organization in the last few days. I’m trying to get the giant minigame class under control by separating things out into various manager classes.
Lots of updates in the last few days. First, I registered a domain, and got the webpack/es6 deployment working with Github Pages using the gh-pages package. We’re live at https://www.deadlanguage.io.
A lot of updates recently, but most of it is behind the scenes.
No visual changes today. Yesterday I spent some time researching Google Firestore as a possible backend data store. It should suit my needs but it’s a different paradigm than I’m used to. I also need to look into importing data because I will need to load a lot of vocab into the database to get started.
Added a tiled background image that I got from Open Game Art. It’s a small change, but it looks a lot better.
I added some logic to keep track of correct guesses as well as misses. This required me to add some collision check logic to determine when the zombies reach the bottom of the screen. Phaser makes that pretty simple.
I added a few more things to get a basic prototype working. I’m starting to have a few ideas about the kinds of classes and control flows I’ll need to keep this maintainable. My next steps are adding support for multiple correct answers (e.g. “time” can be “vez” or “tiempo”), keeping track of successful responses, implementing a game timer, and keeping track of misses/freeing up words (currently zombies just walk off the bottom of the screen forever).
It’s been a while. I was out of town for a week and didn’t work on this at all. The Phaser course is going well. I don’t know the best way to structure a large javascript/phaser application, so my one file game is getting a little bloated. I put some hacky code together and managed to get a sprite and some text on screen, and some logic to compare submitted guesses against the value on screen. It’s a nice start. The zombie graphic came from here. OpenGameArt.org is a great community with helpful people and it’s full of useful resources. The creator of this sprite says they are with lonegames.net, but the website is defunct.
