My Web330 course assigned a project which had the premise of “A game or experience written with the Javascript canvas.” I chose to make a game and my idea was a gravity platformer.

You can check it out here

There’s as much of a writeup as I could manage here which details some gameplay aspects and details.

Originally, like pretty much all Web330 projects, we are expected to host them on our university’s student server. However, it can be slow and has a very storage size limit. Halfway through the project I discovered I could host it through Github pages. I thought maybe it’d be a nice idea since all I’d need to do to preview things would be to push to the repository. It came with some issues though, since the page complaining about cross-domain resources. I discovered this was because the resource-loading code my professor provided used XHR to load things, and Github pages hosted the page under the domain githubpreview.com or something while the resources were still hosted on github.com, and that differing domain caused a lot of havoc. Mostly because I didn’t know much about XHR and had to do a lot of research.

Overall the project was rather enjoyable. Something very small and without much expected of it was refreshing to work on. And while it remained small, it is still very extensible should I choose to make something more of it in the future. The final levels were rather rushed though, because I didn’t have a lot of ideas and there was a requirement of 4 levels minimum. If I had more time and drive to work on it, I would add more diversity to things and actual challenges. I left a lot of room to add character into the game through images and the info box for each planet, but again I didn’t have any ideas at the time, so that will be something I’ll work on later if I choose to.