Voidcall – Making of 13kb JavaScript RTS Game | Hacker News Reader

Voidcall – Making of 13kb JavaScript RTS Game

phoboslab.org

236 pointsash15 comments

Many javascript code compression techniques are used to create even shorter demos, animations and even games, using 140 characters or less, by the Dwitter community. E.g. a similar to Perlin noise image used to create the terrain (in this 13k game) was made with less than 140 characters of JavaScript, see here: https://www.dwitter.net/top/month Some Dwitter members are also developers of 13kb games.

One pleasant byproduct of perusing Dwitter Web is you can pick up a lot of esoteric mathematics formulas ;)

https://www.dwitter.net/h/math

Also, http://js1k.com

Nice it reminds me of the classic Runescape to an extent. I wasnt big on Runescape at the time like my friends were but I still admire the game. I know some still remember it fondly it is one of the icons of mid 2000s gaming much like Starcraft.

This was an incredible read for me! I've always wanted to write a game from scratch, but never quite found the time - and it's a bit daunting if you don't know where to start.

Really appreciate the commentary, details and code snippets!

The previous game, Underrun, was excellent, and I took to heart his points on sound files taking up a lot of space. Using synth sounds is relatively easy to generate and takes up only a few bytes for code snippets.

Excellent post, thanks for sharing. You may want to read up on influence maps if you want to improve the AI.

Also you should check out a book called Programming an RTS Game with Direct3D if you can find a copy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1584504986/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_BQ...

As I wrote to you before, your game looks amazing. I think you could probably expande it a bit. But it's very unclear what's going on.

For people wondering about it, you can select the engineers and make them build harvesters and turrets. There is one medic who will heal the unit closest to him.

Great write-up! It's very interesting to see how one actually goes around making a game in such short time. I have been doing computer graphics stuff as a hobby for some years, and I know your pain when it comes to OpenGL shenanigans. Keep it up!

Only 1664 bytes?

I guess if you shove all the heavy lifting out to extensive libraries, you can do that.

I, for one, prefer kkrieger. 98kB, but a full Doom-3-level 3D shooter. All without putting an OS... inside an OS.

What are you on about? kkrieger also makes extensive use of the Windows/D3D apis.

I don't even think these people understand what they think they are criticizing. Leveraging external code doesn't make something less impressive -- the extent in which you can leverage other code like graphics APIs is what becomes impressive.

I suppose they think they are being some sort of technical pedant, but surely anyone with any actual technical chops knows otherwise.

Yes it does.

Example: My new language "Crysislang". It has only one one-bit instruction. That, when compiled, results in a whole Crysis game.

A whole 3D shooter! Written in only one bit! Ain’t I amazing? ;))

I think you get my point.

If your libraries and environment do all the work, writing a small program that does big things approaches triviality.

That is true. They are quite a different beast than HTML5 though. Not much left to code yourself there.

It’s the difference between using Canvas, and writing Canvas.

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