As mentioned in my previous post, I was planning on porting Mirrors, which I have done. Twice. First I rewrote it in vanilla JavaScript. Well I started rewriting it, but I didn’t even finish implementing the game’s fundamental mechanics before I realized that I never want to deal with JavaScript’s awful untyped style. Maybe it’s because I’m used to Java, and its strongly-typed OOP style programming, but whatever the reason is, I strongly dislike writing games in JavaScript. Even using tools like JSLint, my codebase seemed to become spaghettified very quickly. I’m sure some js experts out there will argue that is entirely my fault, and can be prevented by using better programming patterns, but for now at least, I’m staying away from the language if at all possible.

So I had decided against using JavaScript, but I still wanted the portability of web programming, and could deal with using html and css. That’s when I found TypeScript. What a beauty of a language. Technically a ‘typed superset’ of JavaScript, according to their website. Whatever they call it, I love it. It has a few extra features, two of the most beneficial in my opinion are classes and inheritance. Again, maybe this is because of my limited knowledge of other programming patterns, but nonetheless I somewhat rely on that architecture, at least at this point in my career.

Technical information aside, I finished the port! Now you can play Mirrors in a web browser, on both desktop and mobile, over here! I also completed a fourth game in the middle of rewriting Mirrors, which technically makes it my third finished game of the year I suppose. It’s just a simple clone of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe, and you can play it here. That pushes my total up to four games out of twelve! One third of the way there! Hmm, so I’ve done 33% of the games, in 60% of the year… that’s not great. I don’t have a lot of hope for completing my goal by the end of the year. After attempting to make a game a month, I don’t know if it’s something I want to do. I could make twelve shitty games in one month if I really wanted, but I want to spend time making quality, fun games, and that’s hard to do in the span of a single month, when I’m busy with school and work.

So maybe I’ll finish a few more games in the remainder of 2015, but I don’t plan on completing 12. Right now I’m working on a binary finite state machine implementation in TypeScript, which is more of an application than a game. For the first time in a long time I won’t be working or have any homework to do during Ludum Dare, so I’m planning on actually giving it a good effort. Hopefully I’ll be back at the end of the month with my completed entry into the compo!