This year, I’ve really been challenged by John Sonmez’s idea of “Become a Finisher“:

If you want to accomplish your goals, you need to learn to finish what you start. It really is as simple as that.

John’s big deal is “You’ve just gotta commit”. It’s called The War of Art.

And I’m not a shining example of this. But I’m aspirational. I did commit to building a game this year, and even though it took until December to make any decent progress, it’s actually happened! I’m a finisher!

I’ve just finished my first full-on, from scratch Phaser game. It’s called Glen’s Invaders.

I’ll wait while you play… Or just enjoy an animated gif below..

Glen's Invaders In Action

Enjoy it? I hope so.

It’s not special, but it’s fun.

And more importantly it’s finished. Totally good enough for a first game.

The source is on BitBucket if you’re interested.

Phaser is an amazing JavaScript library for writing browser-based games. The abstractions are at just the right level for getting stuff done, and the docs and support are absolutely top notch. You should totally check it out!

Even writing this super simple game has introduced me to:

  • Phaser Scenes with Menus, Asset Bootloaders, and Progressbars
  • Collision detection with Arcade Physics
  • Spritesheets, Sprite Groups and Pixel art editing
  • Web Audio
  • Highscoring with LocalStorage
  • Using touch and joystick controls via Phaser plugins
  • The complexity of scaling to devices (still mostly a mystery to me)
  • Bitmapped backed Sprites and custom Canvas drawing
  • Bitmapped fonts and custom anchor calcs
  • The many challenges of this in idiomatic JavaScript
  • Browser Developer Tools debugging

It’s been a blast :-)

I’m hoping to run a free “Getting Started” Canberra JS Games workshop in 2016 to share the little I’ve learned with those keen to get started writing their first game. Will keep you posted!

Here’s to an amazing, creative 2016!