Tower of Fun - Part 2

Pixel art makes all the difference

Expanding on the previous, I decided to improve the art in the game.

SOURCE

PLAY

Tower of Fun - Part 1

TileMap and Player

This is where it really begun. Tower of Fun. Last time, I made myself a dungeon generation algorithm based on BSP trees and got it up and running on Phaser using tilemaps. Now, it’s time to really set the stage. Tower of Fun will build upon our simple dungeon generator and head to version 1, ending up something like this:

SOURCE

Play

Using Markdown via StackEdit on Blogger

StackEdit for Blogger

I had posted the default Hello page from StackEdit to demo how amazing StackEdit can be. StackEdit is a markdown editor, with integrated featured from font-awesome, highlight.js, MathJax, flowchart.js and so much more that I have yet to discover. I went ahead wrote some more pages for my Tower of Fun project.

• Tower of Fun
• Intro to Phaser
• Dungeon Generator

Dungeon Drawing in Phaser using Tilemap

Introduction to Phaser

The Dungeon Generator creates perfecrtly logical maps. You could witness the perfection in the console by using Dungeon.print(). But, really… we can’t have a game on the console right?

That’s where Phaser comes in. Phaser is an HTML5 game enigine that’s based on webGL, with a neat fallback to HTML5 Canavs. It is super lightweight and mobile platform oriented. The best part? The massive store of documentation and examples. And, there a whole load of tutorials out there that would help a noob like me figure out how things are done. This was the first Phaser tutorial I took. You should really check out the examples to see what Phaser is capable of.

Hello StackEdit!

Welcome to StackEdit!

The whole of this is what StackEdit can do. I am sabsolutely stunned. I don’t think I will ever go back to the vanilla Blogger Editor.

I mean, look at the stuff I have already published using StackEdit:
http://robotcantalk.blogspot.in/p/blog-page.html
http://robotcantalk.blogspot.in/2014/10/dungeon-drawing-in-phaser-using-tilemap.html
http://robotcantalk.blogspot.in/2014/09/dungeon-generator.html


Hey! I’m your first Markdown document in StackEdit1. Don’t delete me, I’m very helpful! I can be recovered anyway in the Utils tab of the Settings dialog.

Project: Tower of Fun

I am not really sure how I ended up here, but I like it and I think I shall continue while the interest lasts. It's been a month or two since I began dabbling with the web, and one fine day, last week I had decided to implement a dungeon generator. There's a fancy word for this -"Procedural Content Generation" - wiki, I think. The end game I have in my mind is probably some sort of minimalist roguelike built on html5 and Javascript.

Dungeon Generator

Look! A Dungeon Generator. Once you have played enough dungeon crawlers, you just have to build your own dungeon crawler (#amiright?!). Since, my current fascination is web development (read: Dabbling, look at that neat calculator), I figured I might as well make a web game. Playing Heroes of Loot might have had something to do with this.

A procedural generated fast-paced infinite dungeon crawler is what I have in mind. Hence, first off, I need a neat Dungeon Generating algorithm. You know... those rooms and corridors. 

Dabbling with the Web

My work usually involves a lot of experimentation. Well, aside from the thinking part, the part that takes the longest is comprehending the results. The sooner I understand the outcome, the sooner I can apply and augment the experiment. That's where Data Visualization comes in. Truth be told, I got tired of reading and parsing log files, each with four million plus lines of text. Perl helped a lot in the early days. I used Perl to parse these colossal logs and create simple static web reports. The keyword here being static. Being static, I used to render the web reports and store them. Or if I wanted to compare some trials, create a new report for that too. Manual work.

I believe there was a greater scope for improvement here. Though that did help improve experimentation rate by 10x - being no small number by itself. Having an interface to deal with a huge database of raw data - would be ideal. That's where Dynamic Web comes in to picture. That meant I had to learn html, css, javascript, jQuery or whatever these web Devs use these days. Head on over to CodeAcademy and arm yourselves.

In order to test myself, I made a calculator. Styling inspired by Google's Material Design.

edit: I got myself a bitballoon account and hosted my dabbling - http://sonallearsntoweb.bitballoon.com/

PLAY

Dilapidated

This Blog is Absolutely Dilapidated.

di·lap·i·dat·ed

diˈlapiˌdātid/

adjective

1. (of a building or object) in a state of disrepair or ruin as a result of age or neglect.

   synonyms:

   run-down, tumbledown, ramshackle, broken-down, in disrepair, shabby,battered, beat-up, rickety, shaky, unsound, crumbling, in ruins, ruined,decayed, decaying, decrepit; More

Shut Up and Take My Money - MicroView

MicroView on Kickstarter

Their Website

The MicroView is the first chip-sized Arduino compatible that lets you see what your Arduino is thinking using a built-in OLED display.

It's the cutest Arduino I have ever seen.

Look at it. LOOK!

More!

OMG Wow! It's so CUTE!

This is definite Shut up and Take My Money artifice. 

DFT on an Arduino

You read that right. DFT, not FFT. Discrete Fourier Transform, DFT.

Why would I do such a thing you ask? Why not just simply use the faster and simpler FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)? It even has Fast as part of its name!

Well, I was still on chapter 11 of this amazing book The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing by, Steven W. Smith as this experiment. FFT was the next chapter. There's an on-line abridged version too: http://www.dspguide.com/

 Why? Letsee... About a month back (2013Dec), Ashok asked me on facebook whether I knew anything about embedded systems and microelectronics. I replied that I did, but I had never actually used one. I told him that there some cool stuff around - Arduino and such, that make prototyping super easy. I then remembered an old memory. I always wanted to learn DSP properly and new exactly what I wanted to do with that knowledge. Back in college I had absolutely wasted away my DSP course by slacking off. Regretful :(