10k TowerDefense (JS & Canvas) | Hacker News Reader

10k TowerDefense (JS & Canvas)

10k.aneventapart.com

73 pointsshawndumas20 comments

Does it ever stop being news when someone writes any game in JS/Canvas? As a serious question, how long until we have to judge these games on the same standards for which we would judge the state of the art in Flash or as a native iPhone app? Five years?

My guess is that this wasn't notable/upvoted because it was written in JS/Canvas, but rather because it was written in only 10K of JS/Canvas.

Well, there are 184 other apps (and counting) in that contest that fit that same criterion:

http://10k.aneventapart.com/

yes but this one is very fun...

This TD is awesome, I don`t know what you're talking about. Let's just say that I've played this game instead of SC II for the last hour.

If you're a fan of TD games you should check out the Protector series. Then you'll know what he's talking about.

http://protectorworld.com/

Yes if you haven't played those, or GemCraft I and II, or the original Desktop Tower Defense, I don't see why you'd touch this. (Not to mention Plants vs Zombies if you are willing to pay ten dollars for a fantastic game.)

Actually, I preferred the other version. I've tried Protector IV and didn't really liked it.

What's happening with Canvas/JS right now is exactly what happened with the Flash scene about 7 years ago. Every little interactive thing pushed out to the web community was fawned over simply because it was now doable in the browser.

My guess is once IE 9 is finally pushed to the public and HTML5 is considered stable, we'll stop finding this all hype worthy.

On the other hand, the usual reply to stories like these is "yeah, but you couldn't make something as complicated as x", so the link bears some merit besides the 10k code.

I wrote a mini JsDTD (unfinished) last year:

http://alexle.net/experiments/jsdtd/

(code is at http://github.com/sr3d/JsDTD).

I didn't use canvas, just straight HTML.

Side story: I went to an interview at Zynga and demo'ed it. I think I was able to impress the guys there, one of them even thought it was done in Flash. It was just Chrome runs everything so fast. (I got an offer from them but ultimately decided to not take it :) In my opinion, it's definitely a good strategy to build some thing cool, then mention it at the end of a job interview like "by the way, this is what I built". It worked for me.

If you don't mind my asking, what did the offer look like? Feel free not to answer if you'd rather not say.

We never talked about money. They were about to offer me the position as PHP developer, but I was about to leave the country for a few months while Zynga needed someone right away. The offer was shelved until I'd be back in the country a few months later. I got back to the US but I'm bootstrapping my startup at the moment, so I have not renewed the conversion with their HR. Zynga is a really cool company. I enjoyed my interview there quite a bit, getting to know the details about their platform and servers infrastructure -- it was quite fascinating.

Yours should be more like 'front defence.' Anyway, good job, I would definitely remove it from the 'experiments' section if I were you, this game is popular... I like how the turrets are missing from time to time.

PS: Why front(+al) defence? Well, expand the game field a bit more, and put the player into defending strategic locations, let the AI figure a way through... I can imagine giant fields & fortified positions, much like WWI :)

(Or you could christen the game 'Lobotomy')

If you like to cheat at games like me.. Set a breakpoint in the minified jQuery source, follow the callstack back to the game's scope, then set c.W to something high like 1e9. Now you got lotsa cash monay.

Ah, cheating. An integral part of playing games. And one of the benefits of having the actual code, in this case. Hooray for JS and Canvas.

A couple years ago a friend of mine and I wrote http://ptdef.com/ which is canvas/js as well but with randomized maps and pathfinding creeps.

That was very cool. The only thing I'd say would be great on top would be some 8bit chip sounds...

I agree with WilliamLP: It would really make this a lot more interesting if the process of the implementation of this game was documented as well. Nonetheless this is pretty cool especially given the constraints of fitting it in 10K.

This is what I did after 1 hour! http://imgur.com/nFjZD.png you know testing out the code :)

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