I used to love Tamagochis, although I could never keep one alive. Thankfully little humans are easier to look after, and by now they can feed themselves. I used to play a game called Kingdom Of Loathing in the early 2000’s, a very sarcastic, choose-your-own-adventure RPG game. I’d always wanted to try to build something like that; text-based and story-rich.
For me the most fun part a new game is when you go off the beaten track and head away from where you are supposed to go. In fact, it’s the first thing I usually do in a game. In reality, the extent of my ‘adventuring’ is trail running. So I guess I still get off-road often but it doesn’t compare to my teenage years of travelling the world and truly exploring. And currently, with the world getting equal parts mad and scary, my wanderlust will have to settle for being digital for now.
I’ve decided to start a little coding adventure of my own: to build a pocket-sized backpacker simulation game using JavaScript.
The rough idea is: your backpacking avatar travels from town to town,city to city, crossing oceans and continents, with no player control, just curiosity. You can check in to see where they are, learn a little about the place (maybe from Wikipedia? or viewed on a map), and see what the local weather is like. Sometimes they’ll get sick, or stuck, or simply decide to move on. Like life, random shit can happen.
I’m fairly familiar with CSS/HTML but I’ve only used Javascript in the context of animation. Never to develop with. So this will be a fun challenge to tighten up my understanding of JS, while also teaching me some new things about the following:
- How to fetch and display live data using APIs
- How to manipulate the DOM in JavaScript
- How to use asynchronous programming (async/await)
- How to use local storage for save data (config files?)
- How to implement animations using Lottie or CSS
- How to embed JavaScript into a WordPress site
My plan is to document each step here: from the planning, trail and error, failures, inspiration and finally getting to where the character sets out across the map for the first time!
I’m calling it WeeRover (for now, still thinking of a better name!). A wee virtual backpacker, driven by APIs, random chance and curiosity.
Next step: Create a WIP design document for the game in the next post. Stay tuned!