More Steps with SVG
Sunday, 4. February 2007, 12:18:24
Play Steps!
Steps is a turn based game where you must move the red circle to the red square while avoiding the arrows. You can move 1 square at a time either up, down, left or right using the mouse or the arrow keys. You move first, then each of the arrows will move in turn onto the next available square in the direction they are pointing. When an arrow reaches the edge of the board it will wrap around onto the opposite edge. With each new level the number of arrows increases.
Good luck!
Edit
After a bit of play testing many of my friends complained that the game was too slow & that they didn't like waiting for the arrows. They are wrong, but still never let it be said that I don't listen to feedback.
Steps version 1.1 Changelog:
Steps is a turn based game where you must move the red circle to the red square while avoiding the arrows. You can move 1 square at a time either up, down, left or right using the mouse or the arrow keys. You move first, then each of the arrows will move in turn onto the next available square in the direction they are pointing. When an arrow reaches the edge of the board it will wrap around onto the opposite edge. With each new level the number of arrows increases.
Good luck!
Edit
After a bit of play testing many of my friends complained that the game was too slow & that they didn't like waiting for the arrows. They are wrong, but still never let it be said that I don't listen to feedback.
Steps version 1.1 Changelog:
- Fixed bug where target repositioned on top of player.
- Added check box to toggle animation of arrows.
- Added hip & funky titling to get down with the kids.
The inspiration for Steps came from an old Amiga PD game from way back in 1990 called Stepz by Mark E. Whitehead. I remember playing this on my brothers A500 as a kid. The original idea was great but I found the implementation flawed for a number of reasons.
Firstly Stepz was spelt with a 'z' on the end.
The control was not intuitive, you couldn't use the joystick & you had to move the counter by clicking buttons positioned at the side of the board. In my version you can either click directly on the square you want to move to or use the arrow keys (Opera & FireFox only, IE+ASV doesn't seem to register the keypresses).
There was no sequence to the game. You chose how many arrows you wanted to face (2 to 16) then worked your way from the bottom of the board to the top. In my version you start off against 2 arrows & increase by 2 more with each level & have to work your way to a single target square that randomly changes position once you get there.
You could only face at most 16 arrows, in this version the theoretical limit is 62, although you have no chance of reaching that far! If anyone can get further than my personal best of level 11 (22 arrows) let me know.
The biggest annoyance though was that you couldn't reliably predict where the arrows would move to. The arrows skip over each other if they get in each other's way & as such their movement was dependant on the order that they moved. However, when you selected your move the whole board updated with a single repaint & when there were a lot of arrows on the board you had no idea which arrow skipped to where. To get round this my version updates the board one arrow at a time allowing you to see the order of the moves which in turn gives you enough information to predict where everything will end up.
This gives the game a more chess like quality (especially from level 6 onwards) in that you have to plan several moves ahead (sometimes you need to move away from the target square when you are right next to it!).
I was quite pleased with this project. I do all my coding & testing in Opera, then when I am finished I check it in FireFox & IE+ASV. This is my first javascript project that has worked in all browsers (well apart from keyboard control in IE) straight off the bat!
WIDGETIZE
