Debugging was extremely easy with a customized function ( imaged above), and it allowed me to re-architect the game into a single element which could be embedded at a later date into third-party HTML5 sites such as Kongregate or Itch.io. I was also able to easily normalize the character’s speed so moving diagonally would not be an advantage.
ITCHIO STARTUP PANIC CODE
Sprites were animated in four directions based off the sprite sheets I had, and the map was rendered using tilesets and an array (8147 lines of code in the map.json-I’ll explain more in a bit). Not only was the player movement bug fixed, but a lot of quality of life changes were made in the initial Phaser build of the game. I was able to get a basic single player version of the game up and running in just two evenings by looking at some examples and r̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ t̶h̶e̶ d̶o̶c̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ digging through the distribution file to see what the functions were actually doing things were looking up for the Phaser re-write. With the amount of time allotted for this sprint, I decided to play with Phaser during off-hours just to see if it was feasible to re-write the game and still meet our deadline.
TO PHASER, OR NOT TO PHASER: THAT IS THE QUESTION The downside: Phaser 3 is considered “bleeding edge” technology with few examples and documentation that leaves a lot to be desired. Phaser also easily builds tile maps and renders animations based off of sprite sheets. On one hand, the player movement bug would be solved inherently by porting to Phaser as it handles movement and collision really well. We weighed the advantages and disadvantages of using Phaser. Do we refactor the Vanilla JavaScript code that was written for the initial sprint, or do we do a total re-write using the JavaScript library Phaser? The first item on our Kanban Board was labeled “urgent!” and corresponded to a potential pivot point for the game, a decision that needed to be made before any other game features could be coded.
Going into the second sprint we had a strong project management outline using “HacknPlan” (free web app that models Atlassian’s “Jira”), which defines two bug fixes and roughly 230 hours of development tasks ranging from programming, art, design, writing, marketing, audio, and new features.
If you are just finding this article I would strongly suggest you check out The Making of Panic in the Dark Part 1. This is part two of “The Making of Panic in the Dark,” a zombie-themed, multiplayer HTML5 game using Node.js, Express, MySQL, Sequelize, and Socket.IO.
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