W(io)2

A velo implementation of the popular trend of io games.

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Inspiration

We really enjoy io games. They're seemingly so simple yet they offer various forms of it to make it a genre, without being boring.

From the classic colorful ball that grows bigger with time, to evolving animals according with how much "food" has been eaten. But then again, wouldn't it be fun to have a way to make teams?

So we decided to make every ball with the same color the same team!

What it does

It's a game that allows you to make halls,allowing people to enter your hall.

After than, people can start "eating" little points of color, which provide 1 point each. Or, if they are lucky,daring and tactical enough, they can try their hand at eating some other player.

You can also try to dodge by changing colors! But be ware, changing colors consumes points, and it only comes in a well know sequence, so you may want to think twice.

How we built it

Firstly, we laid the menu with buttons and textboxes.

After that, we used the "wix-data" to allow us to use a database for creating lobbies and "wix-realtime" for actually running the lobby/hall.

Once created, we skipped to the actual game. The game uses the svg approach that was seen in the "space invaders" example provided, and for that, the use of pixel art was really a good idea. And for the UI it uses basic wix elements from editorX.

Challenges we ran into

First of all, we hadn't used wix before. While we were decently proficient with javascript and the like, we really didn't had experience with either the wix service or velo development.

We had hoped to use something like the canvas element of html to draw with javascript, while using velo mostly for menus and UI. But we weren't really able to find canvas anywhere on wix/velo. So there goes plan #1. Then plan #2 consisted of using "wix-animations" to move the elements around, with "wix-window" to force it to move with the ball, however, the listeners seems to be single threaded, since our double click didn't break the movement loop initiated by single click.

So, after a little bit of frustration, one of us jumped into the space invaders example game. Honestly, its a joy, and since we had finished the art by that time, and because of size limitations on image uploads we had already opted for pixel art and svg for resizes-ability it just fit in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The online,real-time nature of it.

One may think it's not big deal, but it was quite amusing to make the game run like that. It wasn't that trivial.

What we learned

Needless to say: Velo and wix. Also a bit on concurrence and the actually surprisingly creative fact that svg can be used to make multi-platform games. That approach to render things proved to work great while on localhost (ie: not rendering from payloads fetched from a wix-realtime channel), and I dare to say it would have worked great on wix if not for the limited nature of the free plan. Yet, I'm amazed it even works on the free part.

What's next for W(io)2

One of us proposed to make procedural maps, however, time ran out.

We would actually like to do it, one idea for it is using graph theory's ear decomposition. Create a mace by making the paths small corridors, and then cutting at least two doors for each path, that way the inner part should be accessible.

That of course, presents its own set of problems and while computationally should be feasible, we're out of time.

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