Cloning Zelda, part 5B

Previous posts in this series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3A | Part 3B | Part 4A | Part 4B | Part 4C | Part 5A

I haven't yet finished writing up all that I've done for the next installment of my Cloning Zelda series, but in the meanwhile, I wanted to share the test page I've created to evaluate monster behavior, AI, and state management. It's here, at the Canvassa Bestiary.

A few notes on what the Bestiary does: arrow keys allow you to move Link around the canvas. Pushing the first set of buttons and selecting different radio options will change Link's animation and appearance; right now if you push the "Die" button, Link will in fact die, and the game simulation will end; you'll have to refresh the page to start it up again.

The next two sets of buttons will let you spawn enemies into the canvas... the first group is for overworld enemies, and the second group is for dungeon enemies, which I hadn't yet tried to do. Each will spawn in the correct way for that monster type (e.g. Armos enemies start out in their statue state), and all have basic AI that will determine how they move (even Peahats, Zolas and Leevers now work more or less correctly, although Tectites still look strange when jumping). I haven't yet added projectile attacks or sprite collisions; that's why I haven't blogged a full entry about the Bestiary yet (I hope to have that for this week's regular update on Tuesday).

Final technical note: I've tested the Bestiary in Firefox 3.0.10, Chrome, and MSIE 7 (IE is sloooow, but functional). Notably, I've also successfully tested it on my Windows Mobile smartphone, in Opera Mobile 9.5 beta! Again, it's slow, but even seeing it WORK on my phone was pretty frigging cool. Hopefully the Javascript performance war that has been raging on desktop browsers for the past year, will next find its way to the mobile platforms. Ultimately I'd love to be able to develop games and apps in HTML5/canvas and deploy to both desktop and mobile browsers in one click. What a cool step forward that will be.