Mongoose Rocks!
A few weeks ago, I told you about my spare-time project, jsMaze. Well, I'm still working on it. It now has a "War" mode, with bullet images that spin away and towards you, sounds, and I just finished a scrolling div for the chat. Now I'm focusing on user accounts, so that users can upload their player images, create mazes, and add wall images to those mazes. I had prototyped the account creation and login code in Amazon's SimpleDB and in Redis. Both worked, but were somewhat of a pain. This morning, I converted that code to Mongoose, a MongoDB object modeling tool. Yow! The new code is clear and simple. Mongoose, FTW!
jsMaze Bullets
My jsMaze hacking is coming along. There are now player images, simple line drawings, and you can chat with other players (anybody that could see you, were he facing your direction, can "hear" what you type. Now I've created bullet images. They're not the clearest photos, but they'll do for now.
jsMaze
jsMaze.com is a new game I'm developing. JavaScript on the client. Node.js on the server. Socket.IO for network communication. Redis for persistence. The server is running now on an Amazon EC2 micro-instance.
Currently, other players appear as blue rectangles. I'll make a better default appearance soon, that will let you know which direction they're facing. Then chat. Then missiles. At that point, it will be a copy of the maze game I played on the PDP-10 machines at Project Mac at MIT in the mid-seventies.
Planned development: individual accounts, bandwidth and storage paid with credits, daily credit allowance, or buy them from me. Individual character images as front, back, left, and right PNGs or GIFs, wall hangings and drawings, individual mazes with access control and image moderation. Inanimate objects. Scripts to turn inanimate objects into robots.
And whatever else I and my community of players/coders dream up.
Open source: github.com/billstclair/jsmaze