Hey ludumers!
After watching Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho’s video a while ago, I learned 2 things :
- this “juicyness’ thing that these guys talk about actually exists and works
- particle systems are indeed fun to program!
Now think about it: adding particles and effects to a game is a really cheap trick you can do to make the game look and feel more lively, reactive and spectacular. Particles don’t really interact with anything existing in the game, they just spawn, live their glittery short life and die. It’s very easy to just plug in particle emitters in a almost finished game, set up some emitters and triggers and watch everything explode/sparkle.
With that in mind, I put together a particle system library in JavaScript that renders awesome particles on an HTML5 canvas. Since I’ve created it for an LD event, I named the library Particle48. I intend to use it in every game I’m going to make for LD and I thought I could share it with whomever is interested. Here’s the project on github and a demo – I wish this to become a collaborative work.
Here’s a screenshot, but bear in mind that screenshots don’t always do justice…
Tags: github, html5, javascript, library, particles
Some really nice effects there. I will look at it in detail later.
Just out of curiosity: what do you use to code the javascript?
I’m using Aptana, which is a spin-off of Eclipse for web stuff (HTML, JS, Ruby). It’s one of the few IDEs for JS that has some autocompletion support (it’s very limited, but it’s there).
Thanks, I’ll give it a try.