This weekend is the 20th anniversary of the Ludum Dare game jam. Although I'm not exactly a video game developer, I've certainly loved the idea of making them, and have made a dozen or so as a hobby over the last 20 years. Additionally, although I'm fond of the idea of game jams/hackathons, etc, I can't say I've ever actually done one, and I didn't change that this weekend.
So what did I do this weekend? Well instead of working on my years-in-the-making maybe-commercial new site with a hefty backlog of issues that I haven't even blogged about yet... I finished a game I'd been thinking about for a few months now!
I give you, Grow a plant!, a free (as in beer) "game" where you...grow...a...plant! The controls are simple, at the top you have a speed bar which will speed up/slow down the rate of plant growth. Then you have R/G/B bars which represent the proportion of Red, Green, and Blue in the colors of the plant. There is no winning or loosing, and even with the defaults you will eventually see a "pretty" plant grown right in your browser.
Admittedly this game is not deep or complicated. No skill (or interaction) is required. This game helps fulfill my desire for more simple, non-commercial, aquarium-like things that one can have on in the background to add some sort of chill, digital asthetics to life. Another example that I've used in the past is Agar.io's spectator-mode with the names/skins/points turned off.
Usually I'd put this sort of thing on my github, however when considering this I realized it would take this project from a single file to at least 3 (adding a readme and license), and since the source is already fully contained in the game page, there wasn't a huge benefit. I did though, need somewhere to host it. This re-ignited a line of thinking I'd been considering for a few months now about a place on this website where I could host a collection of simple, free games. I've always wanted a place like this to exist, mostly because of the heavy commercialization of every other place on the internet where such things exist now-days. Thus Games was born!
I certainly have many other things that are arguably more important to be focusing on these days, but these dozen-or-so hours over the last few days have been a blast. I learned more about Canvas, experimented with artistic styles, re-learned properties of Polynomials, and appreciated cutting scope. With that said, Let the Games Begin!
Happy Hacking!
- Chris