![]() Global Defense is a game I built in my spare time. The list goes on, the day job is back in full effect, and I’ll have to take it one chunk at a time since there is zero momentum. Making the bullets lasers instead? 1 day. Making the asteroids more geometric instead of circles? 1 day. There are still have some things I’d like to do, but I’ve learned through this process that each feature adds about another day of work. Launch went well, except I had a bug where the game would never start. By the next Friday, a week after the demo, I was ready to share it. I took the same Solvable Chunks approach to finish it out. Over the next week I built out a punchlist of all the things I learned I needed. Live demos are always tough, and it’s impossible for me to test 200 simultaneous clients, but it held up and I think people had fun. The demo during the live Shop Talk Show went okay. I bought a domain name and forwarded the DNS.Īnd that was it. ![]() Made the earth change color for 12 frames when hit.I downloaded a font from DaFonts for the UI text score, planet hitpoints, and defcon level.I added a score to give the game a bit more of a point.I made a defcon variable to increase the chance of randomization.Adding a bit of responsiveness for a multidevice strategy means minor refactoring of the ship and planet to be scalable.I added a simple polygon for a ship, but its position affected the initial y-coordinates of the bullets.Improved the single player mode and game joining system.I could have played the game without this stuff, but it was a little more exciting with it. This has a “ Draw the rest of the owl” feel but everything below was optional. On Friday I used my new found canvas skills to rough out a UI. That feature alone may have secured Code as my editor of choice going forward. You can (re)launch your server by hitting F5 and even setup a debugger to step into objects and functions just like a web inspector. I also learned that VS Code is a really great text editor for building and debugging Node applications. Making them fall from the top was simply a matter of increasing the y value every frame and splicing the asteroid object from the asteroids array when it hit the bottom of the screen. Circles have x, y, and radius attributes. I didn’t know much about drawing in canvas, so my first chunk was learning to draw falling-circle shaped asteroids. See the Pen Global Defense v1: Make asteroids fall by Dave Rupert ( on CodePen. The following is a night-by-night, chunk-by-chunk, breakdown of how I built Global Defense. You can choose to keep iterating, redesign to be something more minimal and timeline efficient, or adjust the timeline. Using prototypes you’ll be able to make better timeline estimates if you do a little bit of the work up front. If you’re working solo, keep a development journal you can reference later. You should now have a better idea of what it would take to finish and if the current design is endangering the timeline.Īt the end of your chunk, share and document your learnings with your team. If by the end of 4 or 8 hours you’re still not finished, that’s okay. Losing momentum means it will be more difficult to jump back into solving complex tasks. Keeping problems small and solvable helps you do this. At all costs you want to keep momentum on a prototype. I have the big idea in mind, but I let those later stages be intentionally vague. Knowing that, over thinking or scoping anything beyond that first or third chunk is futile because what I discover in those early stages will dramatically affect what happens in later stages. When working on a chunk, I’m always aware that a problem can give birth to a myriad of baby problems. Solvable chunks is maybe something we do naturally, but applying a light framework around it has really helped me quickly create and maintain momentum. It’s also the length of a morning or afternoon where you can prototype while pretending to check your email. The 4 hours is relevant because -as a parent- it’s roughly the amount of time I have after my kids go to bed. To me, a solvable chunk is a problem I think I can solve in about 4 hours. Breaking a design or idea into smaller pieces, while maintaining a big picture, allows you to prototype each piece of necessary functionality with the aim to inform your design and timeline. To build the game I broke the project up in to something I call “Solvable Chunks”. As I lay awake staring at the ceiling, I realized I might be able to pull it off. On Friday night Chris Coyier and I were scheduled to do a live Shop Talk Show at Web Design Day in Pittsburgh. ’Twas late Sunday night and I got an idea for a multiplayer HTML5 game using canvas, web sockets, and gyroscopes.
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