

Review my HTML5 game - andy_boot
http://nuclearcarrot.com/html5/frantic/
I noticed the standard of most HTML5 games is quite low. The only popular shoot em up out there was Crystal Galaxy and while it looks pretty I dont think its much fun to play. So I wrote my own. Uses graphics from the open Tyrian project.<p>Any feedback welcome.
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rje
I'd love to hear some more details about the design decisions you made and any
performance tradeoffs you ran into.

Otherwise, it's a great start. Some things you might consider:

* Better explosions. You can get pretty good effects with expanding/contracting colored circles, or using an animated sprite. I'm not sure what would be more efficient in html5. For an example check out the explosions in [http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-mon...](http://mochiland.com/articles/flash-game-friday-death-vs-monstars)

* Reduce the size of the player's collision box. Most 'bullet hell' shooters actually use a box much smaller than the player sprite to give the player a bit of leeway as they try to dodge bullets.

* There's a pretty big size mismatch between the player and the enemies, maybe even that out a bit? The small enemies are cool because you can have a lot in a wave, but as a player the small enemies felt frustratingly hard to hit sometimes.

* Bullet image sprites. Guessing there's a performance issue here but I thought I'd suggest it anyways just in case you haven't tried it. A nice bullet sprite will make enemy bullets easier to read and easier for the player to dodge.

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ramblerman
very nicely done. I agree with the last part of this comment. The enemy
bullets are a little off.

The player laser beam is awesome :P

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andy_boot
Hey thanks for he feedback everyone.

Design decisions: Dont rotate images - this really kills performance.

Try not to scale images - My rough performance tests said: draw 1 scaled image
= draw 3 images.

As you guessed, Bullet images sprites were not done for performance reasons. I
might try and add them again and see what it looks like.

I'll experiment with bigger enemies / explosion images / collision box
changes.

I'll write up an article in the future covering my decisions in more detail.
And yes I hate it when HTML5 games kill my CPU I was going to make sure this
one didn't do that.

andy

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svenson
Impressive! Was really surprised at how little it taxed my system, usually I
see my CPU graph shoot straight up. Would love to know how you optimized it as
that's the biggest drawback with most HTML5 games I play.

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coryl
Looked great! Maybe you can write up a post or article about how you made it?

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cabalamat
It's an inspiring demo of what can be done in HTML5. Also a fun game.

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namdnay
To be honest, I prefer your "Cat & Mouse"...

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askhader
edit: perhaps you should change 'cursors' to 'arrow-keys' or some variant in
the instructions.

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ctdonath
Won't work on iPad etc.

