Play the demo here!

I've spent the last couple of weeks adding more powerups, starting to add sound effects and setting up standalone Mac and Windows versions. Quite a few of the new powerups use shaders, which are bits of code which run on the graphics card and add visual effects to the game - a couple of these powerups are shown below:

Greyscale powerup

grey

Ascii powerup

ascii

Dots powerup

dots

I've now got over twenty powerups in the game, which is well on the way to getting to my release target of thirty. I also spent some time brainstorming some ideas for more powerups, so now have plenty of ideas to implement!

ideas

Sound

I've added a couple of sound effects to the game, one when you collect a powerup and another when the player dies; with the sound in the game I want everything to be organically-created, so no bfxr or similar for this game. All the sound effects so far have been created by hitting various objects around my house, so hopefully I can find enough different things for the game. It's also in creating sound effects that the downsides of using a framework rather than an engine for this game start to become apparent - having to create a mute button and add logic to persist it in localStorage is slightly tedious work which an engine would already have built-in.

Standalone

I've also been setting up standalone versions of the game using Electron, which allows the web version to be wrapped and appear as desktop versions. This was fairly straightforward to add to my Grunt workflow, but will need a bit more infrastructure to allow auto-updates before I can make the desktop versions available.

Play the demo here!