“Forward...”

I am still working on the game I mentioned last Early Afternoon Local Time Before Leap Day. The game (to quote another part of the FAQ I wrote so far)...

is an arcade-style, vertically-scrolling shoot 'em up implemented in SVG 1.1, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, and ECMAScript 5 (a standardized version of JavaScript). It requires a browser (or some other agent) with support of those languages, as well as DOM Level 2 Core, HTML, and Events, to run. A pointing device (mouse, trackball, touchpad, etc.) is almost certainly needed to play, and a keyboard might be as well. It plays music and other sounds with XHTML objects, if supported by the agent, but sound is not necessary to play."

(What is perhaps my longest Blogger post ever follows. In short, the game is nowhere near complete or ready, and I haven't released any source or playable part of it.)

The game will be some form of GPL-Compatible free software as defined by the FSF. Since I've been working on it for a good while now and it's pretty much my Thing I Must Make Before I Die Or Worse, it almost certainly won't be public domain or CC0, or under an Expat-style or BSD license. For now, the license is GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3—not exactly universally popular, but it's a strong copyleft so I can maybe re-release it later under the GPLv2, or some less copyleft license, or add additional permissions, or something, as I feel more comfortable.

The game, as I hope to make it, will progress at least somewhat like (ok, maybe a lot like) Mega Man. After you choose one of four characters (each witches in a very vague and general sense, except for the one that definitely is a witch), you'd start in a lovely (or not, depending on my mad art skillz or lack thereof) grassland, with the occasional right-to-left stream and tree. There you'll practice your movement and shooting and bombing and such against some cannon fodder and a boss. After you get through that, you'd go back to a little forge cottage home-base headquarters thinger, where you'll see how to make stronger weapons with different spread and damage characteristics and such—and where you'll learn where you need to go to get the stuff to make them.

You see, there in that home away from Real Life™, you'll also choose between four element-themed stages, each with enemies and a boss of mostly (if not all) a single element. Blast them, gather their excellence of elemental essence execution or whatever, then go back and hope you have enough of the element to craft some new guns—er, staves, swords, daggers, or hammers. Your allowed choices depend on your character, and each yields different bullet patterns (the staff will fire a standard spread shot, and the hammer will pretty much make a small but potent hitbox in front of you).

You might need to play a stage more than once to get your desired weapon, and certainly to make one of your experience level after you've reached new ones from all the *clears throat* continuous firing (maybe when I finish the game I'll finally change my slogan to something I wrote for the game so I can stop mooching off of Brøderbund's manuals), or to create one of the special dream artifact weapons that each would be of entirely different elements and unlock a super-powered mega bomb attack that would use all of your mana points but be entirely worth it when you get to the chain of end stages, where you'll face more massive [redacted] bosses and a [redacted] who reveals that the [redacted] witch is actually [redacted] and other such juicy surprises and stuff. Whee.

Also the stages will almost certainly not be randomly-generated (sorry, roguelike fans), there probably will be no walking around The Guardian Legend-style between stages (though if I can pull that off with the same engine and as a development team of one, that would rock), and the gameplay will be more Raiden and less bullet hell. Well, except for the parts that are Raiden and bullet hell—good luck with those.

For now, besides not being feature-, creature-, stage-, or art-complete, there are some big honking bugs. You see, sound is quite inconsistently supported (with object or audio) so I may just take sound out; import of separate SVG into another SVG via XmlHttpRequest has problems in Internet Explorer 9 even with this importNode hack at A List Apart, so I'd have to find another way to do it or wait for IE10 (I couldn't get the...ick..."Consumer Preview" to run in VirtualBox) or just lump them all in together; and my attempt to use getIntersectionList to hit-test has proven...not so good in IE9 and Opera 11.61:

My Provisional Purple Test Creature shot a three-way spread of fiery yellow bullets at another one, and that one was "killed", but the bullet (lime rectangle) was actually well below the creature's white hitbox (pink square), so I'll have to investigate further or just make my own hitboxes at the internal game level rather than check the ones the SVG API gives out. (That's not even supported in Firefox 10.02 and caused general slowdown and mayhem when I tried it there, so I'll probably just code my own hitboxes.)

No, I didn't actually release it or any part of it yet, so don't ask.