As mentioned in my last post, I have recently gotten an itch for HTML5 development and I am using the Pimps Quest 2 Tech demo

as my canvas.

My focus this month was to “solidify” the game framework. What I mean by this is to put in place subsystems and frameworks that I can use to easily expand the game onto. Some example of these are ;

• Proper inventory management
• —before the inventory was a dumb list that could only be added too, now it is a dynamic array that you can remove items from at anytime and will sort it’s self when an item is removed
• Completely rehauled text bubbles
• — a charm of the original Pimps quest was its use of comic bubbles instead of “subtitles”. I rehauled the maths behind creating speech bubbles so now they not only look a lot nicer, but act the way you expect (tails will always look good no matter what angle)
• Started work on the next gen car shootout mechanics
• — I wanted the shoot out scenes to blow the original Pimps quest out of the water , to do this, I have made it so you can shoot off car tires like in the original, but you can also blow them up with explosions to boot!
• First implementation of phaser 3 shaders!
• — did you know in the original Pimps quest, Hooch am an drink the Bums bottle of Jager and drink? The only real effect is inverting the keyboard controls. I want the whole screen to have a drunk filter ala GTAV or RDR2. Whiles The shader works, I have to make inventory items interactive and still making some game design decisions if it’s even required.
• Actual asset optimization
• — when building this game I would compile it and then attach assets in at the end. Because I want to make working on the game easier I finally got around to installing plugins to do it for me and the plug-in tells me what files are too large. After some cleanup and resizing, I have saved over 60% space and more importantly Load time!

Looking back, some of these things should of been no brainers, but the funny thing about working on Pimps Quest is that I try not to take the development too seriously, as I think that’s apathetical to the legacy of Pimps Quest. But that’s no excuse for sloppy work and I have pulled the project out of a technical slump and it’s much healthier now!

The next large goal is to give the tech demo some real content and hopefully secure a decent art pipeline in regards to animations as right now I am not sure about the best course of action on how to animate and easily import into Phaser. We shall find out together!