
Convergence: complete HTML5 game - DanielRibeiro
http://www.currantcat.com/convergence/
======
gammabeam
Hello there, I'm the one who made The Convergence! Thanks for viewing my game,
I hope everyone enjoyed it!

I didn't have a lot of time to finish it, but I wanted to add the sounds a
friend of mine did, as well as a logo for the awesome CONSTRUCT the devs
mentioned here.

Me & my girl are amazed by the amount of people that played and shared the
game - it's nice to see such positive feelings spreading all around!

I want to polish the game a bit more, I fell like the mechanics deserve it! :D

Thanks for making our day even more special!

~~~
tagawa
You deserve the attention! It's a great game and refreshingly original. I've
got several colleagues playing it now. Looking forward to the planned
improvements...

~~~
gammabeam
Thanks!

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TomGullen
Hi guys! I'm Tom from Scirra and we made Construct 2
(<http://www.scirra.com>).

This is a great game made with our engine, the author has also made it
available on the Chrome Web Store:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lkiiendkaiacnmggpp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lkiiendkaiacnmggppdckogcgmjaoapf)

This game of course deserves it's own post as it's greatly executed, and
without meaning to steal it's thunder we would love to show you a couple more
excellent games made with Construct 2!

Can't Turn it Off <http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/cant-turn-it-off>

Trashoid Attack <http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/trashoid-attack>

We also ran a small competition on our website and there's a bunch more games
to look at here: [http://www.scirra.com/forum/users-choice-final-
poll_topic458...](http://www.scirra.com/forum/users-choice-final-
poll_topic45844.html)

Anyway it's really promising what is coming out of Construct 2 now, me and my
brother (just two of us running Scirra) love playing games like these that get
made! We hope to see lots more :D

All games made in Construct 2 are all pure HTML5, not a whiff of Flash in
sight!

~~~
johnyzee
> _not a whiff of Flash in sight!_

How do you handle sound? HTML5 sound is still very insufficient for games at
the moment in my experience.

~~~
TomGullen
This game doesn't have sound, but Construct 2 does allow for it. We've
actually blogged about HTML5 sound quite a lot:

[http://www.scirra.com/blog/46/more-on-html5-audio-codecs-
and...](http://www.scirra.com/blog/46/more-on-html5-audio-codecs-and-politics)

It's a bit of a minefield and is difficult to manage. MP3 has some strict
licensing rules in regards to distributing games so we made a point of
avoiding it. What we do is dual encode every sound to .ogg and .m4a, this will
cover all browsers/devices. It's not the best solution space wise but it's
safe and works pretty well.

We hope browsers make significant upgrades to HTML5 audio at some point! The
easy option is to use Flash to handle sounds but we think this is cheating,
we're kinda HTML5 purists :)

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phoboslab
Shameless plug: my HTML5 Game Engine <http://impactjs.com/> is a perfect fit
for games like these.

This particular game seems to be made with Construct2 (
<http://www.scirra.com/construct2> ) though - which is a bit more "point-and-
clicky" than Impact.

~~~
TomGullen
Construct 2 is a very powerful engine, and a lot of great games are being made
in it! Describing it as 'point-and-clicky' really doesn't justify it at all.

~~~
phoboslab
I didn't mean "point-and-clicky" in a negative way; sorry if it sounded like
it.

Construct 2 describes itself as "A visual HTML5 game development tool", Impact
however is a programming framework. Someone without programming experience
wouldn't be able to do much with Impact, but may still be able to make great
games with Construct 2.

We're focusing on different target groups and in my book that's great. It's
what HTML5 needs to succeed :)

~~~
AshleysBrain
Yeah, hopefully between us we can silence the Flash critics who claim there
aren't any good tools available :)

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joeyh
Cute.

Having the arrow keys move the woman in reverse puts an odd male perspective
on it though. This could be fixed by making the arrow keys move in the
direction of whichever character is currently right-side-up.

Edit: Having the viewport follow the guy also contributes to this on scrolling
levels, and I don't know how to fix it, aside from just having a character
select at start.

~~~
fiblye
This is the biggest non-issue in any game ever. I can't even imagine how
anybody's first thought would be "how DARE the man be directly controlled by
the arrow keys instead of the woman." I've made games for my girlfriend
several times, with some games having her control me and others controlling
herself, and neither time did we think what character was being controlled was
an issue.

Hell, I actually read this post to her, and she was just completely confused
and annoyed that someone found this a problem.

There's no sexism to be found here. The male just happens to appear on-screen
first and that's who you control. I'd struggle to find a single woman that
would've even noticed that.

~~~
true_religion
> I'd struggle to find a single woman that would've even noticed that.

This is kind of ridiculous. Clearly, people are noticing and some of the
people who notice might be women.

I noticed because I assumed which ever character was right-side up would be
controlled by the arrow keys. I didn't think it was sexist. I thought it was a
flaw in the game.

~~~
fiblye
People tend to focus on characters instead of directions. Since the male was
the first person I controlled, it was natural that I kept on using the arrow
keys to control him and I didn't even take a second to thing about it. Nobody
would expect to be moving right, hit the flip button, and then start moving
left just to "prove the developer treats genders equally." The control scheme
would be disorienting and far more people would complain about that. And if
you suggest the player select their gender at the start, then puzzles would
have to be adjusted to suit this. It's needless effort to appease people that
the game wasn't even made for.

And judging by the name, I'm assuming joeyh is a male, and the only other
person to be "bothered" by it is also a male (dgreensp), so my claim isn't
exactly baseless.

Besides, this was a game made by a couple. There's outrage where their
shouldn't be any. This guy's partner doesn't need to be "liberated from male-
dominated control schemes."

~~~
blasdel
You don't understand at all — the whole point is that you're concurrently
controlling both characters, but then for some reason it's always from the
player's perspective of the male. It's a bug.

The game starts with the male on the bottom, I press right, the and both
characters move to their right. When you flip the male to the top, both
characters move to their left when you press right. I expect my keyboard
movements to directly correspond to both characters from their own
perspective.

------
fiblye
Here's a preview of the HTML5 game I've been slowly working on for a year:
<http://ektomarch.com/games/>

I already have 50 levels made, most of which are the size of large Super
Metroid rooms, and ~60 enemy types. I'm just overwhelmed with work lately and
haven't been able to make much progress.

~~~
city41
I remember seeing this a while back and looking forward to it. Is it playable
anywhere?

------
taylorfausak
This is cool! Reminds me of VVVVVV (<http://thelettervsixtim.es/>), which had
a similar section where you controlled two characters at once. It's a little
strange that the secondary character moves even if the primary one is running
into a wall, but it looks like the puzzles require that.

~~~
arckiearc
It's a lot like Binary Land, a game from the mid 80s:
<http://youtu.be/NLI415emLzQ?t=42s>

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micheljansen
It's actually quite fun to play. I think this is the first time I have said
this about a HTML5 game/tech demo :)

~~~
phoboslab
Good gameplay is not a property of the platform (e.g. HTML5 or Flash), but of
the game itself. Since HTML5 is still very young, there are mostly web devs
building games with it - which often results in games that "feel" wrong.

But I agree, this game is a very nice example of how to do it right.

Also try <http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/> or <http://playbiolab.com/> :)

------
ahrjay
Looks good, I did notice that the appcache has the wrong mime type it's
text/plain and needs to be text/cache-manifest.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Scirra dev here. This is indeed a problem. The thing is Chrome is ultra-strict
about the MIME type and rejects it if it's wrong. Firefox seems happy with it.
Given HTML5 is new and nobody has their servers set up with this MIME type,
and lots of people are already making HTML5 games with our tool, I'm tempted
to say it's Chrome's fault for being too strict... getting everyone to
reconfigure their servers is a real PITA just because Chrome is fussy.

~~~
ahrjay
It's not being "ultra-strict" it's a requirement of the spec[1] that the file
be served with the correct mimetype.

[Edit] It doesn't work in firefox, the attribute triggers the permission bar
but because it's the wrong mimetype it doesn't actually store anything.

Check it in Tools > Options > Advanced > Network

You'll notice that it has the domain referenced but has 0 bytes stored.

[1] [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/offline.html)

~~~
AshleysBrain
Ah - well I guess the spec is written with the future in mind when everyone's
got their servers configured correctly. Until then nobody has their servers
set up right so I think it would be practical for browsers to be a bit more
relaxed. Right now we're seeing a lot of games on servers without this MIME
type, and the browsers respond by requesting all files from the server all
over again every single page reload, probably wasting a lot of bandwidth and
making HTML5 games look bad. I think there's a good case for a bit of
relaxation on the browser side - standards compliance is good, but not if the
web isn't ready yet.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
No... just no. If browsers are relaxed now, then they are forced to provide
backwards-compatibility for all the sites that then rely on those relaxed
standards. Why do you think Internet Explorer is a complete mess and have dug
themselves into a whole of having to ship half a dozen "compatibility modes"
with every new version of their browser? Because they didn't stick to
standards.

------
atacrawl
This is really well done, and would translate _very_ well to a touch
interface.

------
headbiznatch
Fun little game where when the twist became opaque, I immediately was excited
to play more levels. That's a game design win. Thanks for sharing.

------
websymphony
Cool concept and fun to play. Good job.

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nate
That is awesome. Nice work.

------
RyanMcGreal
Charming concept, executed with great skill.

Note: flickers madly on Firefox 7.0.1/Windows XP, but works smoothly on Chrome
15.0.874.106 m/Windows XP.

------
ByteMuse
This is great. The level design is fantastic - a fair difficulty and fun
progression.

------
terrapinbear
How is Convergence a "complete" HTML 5 game without sound?

------
tomrod
Does anyone else think the guy looks a little like Hitler? Perhaps a different
nose...

Just saying. It's hard to tell what exactly I see with 8bit sprites! :-)

~~~
vshade
He looks like a lumberjack

