Although we have a lot to make up for, some recent developments may provide just the content we need to generate more posts. One of the ideas that has been percolating in my mind since Maven's inception is the idea of allowing the player to jump. But 2D games make it difficult to enable such an action. So here is the bottom-line: Maven is going 3D. In this post, I would like to talk a little bit about 1) where we came from, 2) why we wanted new features, 3) what options we considered, and 4) how we implemented our system. However, writing this blog post has shown that this outline will need to span multiple posts.

Part 1: Where We Came From

When I decided to get into game development, I had no idea what kind of games were even possible to make, since I had no experience with programming at the time. Fortunately, I did not try to go the route of full 3D game development, because that would have been difficult. So instead, I wound up pursuing 2D game development.

Types of 2D Games

Top-Down like Pac-Man

Side-Scrolling Platformer like Super Mario Bros.

Obligations have cleared up recently in a significant way to allow development on Maven. We're looking at having something new presentable by the time CGDC rolls around.

In the meantime, check out this trippy shot of soldiers with Flash-like symptoms in the middle of some timing refactors.

This week, we got another awesome song from Michael Shawn Carbaugh II! (At the moment, I'm going to make you wait to hear it though.) After receiving the song, I realized that we have some serious issues with audio looping in Maven's engine. There are basically three methods to looping audio that I have pondered.

Audio Loop Using Single Audio Element

Currently, the engine uses HTML5's audio element with the loop attribute.

The great thing about this method is that it is built into HTML5 and is very easy to implement. For example, the HTML for the example above is simply this:

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<button id="playAudioSingle">Play</button>
<button id="pauseAudioSingle">Pause</button>
<br/>
<audio id="audioSingle" src="IntoDarknessHalfLoop.mp3" loop controls></audio>
<script>
	document.getElementById("playAudioSingle").onclick = function() {
		document.getElementById("audioSingle").play();
	};
	document.getElementById("pauseAudioSingle").onclick = function() {
		document.getElementById("audioSingle").pause();
	};
</script>

However, as you may have noticed, the playback of the loop is imperfect, and the extent of this imperfection varies depending on the browser.