Cloning Zelda: Back-to-School update

After taking a sanity break from my JavaScript/HTML5/Canvas Zelda clone I've been making for the past several months, I've started banging on it again, but haven't been able to muster the energy to actually blog about it, perhaps because the things I've been doing aren't all that technically interesting, just important to do (case in point: I've had the bow & arrow working for a while, but until yesterday's update, it wasn't tied to your rupee count as it was supposed to be). As of this morning, the sword, boomerang, bow, and magic wand are all working more or less as they should be (you can't throw the boomerang diagonally yet, and the wand produces magic waves without you actually waving it, but those are both minor quibbles like the arrow-rupee thing), and I've implemented a cheat code to grant you all items so you can actually, y'know, test them (hint: it uses the Konami Code, or you can just mash the "ALL ITEMS" button down in the corner of the screen)

A couple of the remaining items, however, promise to be interesting: bombs and candles both behave differently than standard projectiles, and the flute, bait, and letter aren't projectiles at all (well, I suppose you could think of the bait as a projectile in the same way that the bomb is, but still... it doesn't actually kill enemies, just attract them). Each of these has the promise of interesting blog fodder:

• bomb: drop a bomb, and after a moment it spawns multiple "explosion" artifacts
• candle: spawns a flame projectile, but it only goes a limited distance and not clear across the screen like the others
• flute: spawns a whirlwind object that picks up the player and warps them to the location of the dungeons
• bait: like the bomb, since you just drop it instead of throwing it -- but it doesn't explode or kill the enemies, it just alters their AI behavior
• letter: causes the old lady NPC to sell you medicine
• medicine: refills your health and then self-destructs

So as I implement these remaining items, I may jot some notes about why each is interesting to implement, and then I'll have something worth talking about here.

Meanwhile, go see the stuff that's already done here