And I put them in my game Glittering Light. They're perfect for the nightmares. (You can see for yourself on itch.io and on my website.) Thank you very much!
What genre are we talking about? In shooters and RPGs you have WASD for movement and the mouse for looking around/shooting/interacting. (Before the mouse, you'd have used Ctrl/Shift/Space.) And then there are the number keys for changing weapons or whatever.
Roguelikes have another preferred set of keys: hjkl for movement, w for wield/wear, e for eat and so on. And still different games have slightly different control schemes, to accomodate unique feature sets.
Other game genres... not sure. I think Metroidvanias on the PC have a somewhat standard scheme that involves the X and C keys for your character's left/right hands. You might want to look into that if you're making a platformer.
Most importantly however, think about your game's needs. Think about discoverability and ergonomics. The space bar for example is an obvious key to try when you haven't read the instructions, and it's equally accessible with both hands. Ask your friends. Ask casual gamers. (Pro tip: they won't be used to WASD, and no amount of explaining will help.) Play your own game a lot and you'll see what doesn't work. You should be fine.
Oh, and don't rely on the numpad. All those laptop users. :P
It's even easier, actually. Create your search box with <input type="search"> instead of <input type="text"> and Firefox at the very least will recognize it and offer to add it to its list of search engines in the search bar's drop-down menu.
I've had Flattr buttons on pretty much everything I put online for over a year now, and I'm yet to get one lousy tip. I gave a bunch of tips myself... and quite a few remained unclaimed. Let's be honest: nobody really uses Flattr apart from a few starry-eyed Germans.
As for WePay... it isn't something you can simply subscribe to and use directly. Is it even available for people outside of the US? (Also, I don't care what they say. Asking for your SSN? Seriously? I call a scam.)
The truth is, PayPal is an unmitigated monopoly. Nobody uses PayPal because they like or trust the service; everybody uses PayPal because it's quite literally the only game in town. If they screw you over, well, you're screwed. We'd better get used to the truth: the powers that be don't like little people being able to get paid instantly from anywhere in the world -- that's too much power in our hands. I'd recommend BitCoin instead, but that's an even bigger scam.
So thanks for the reminder, but it's not out of ignorance that people still use PayPal. For most of us, it's simply the only chance to earn even pocket money from someone who's not a shitty local employer. And unfortunately I can't live without money. It's this little bit of independence, for however long it lasts, or none at all.
Even my case aside, it's really common for games to use propertiary file formats for their data (most because us gearhead programmers can always think of a 'better' way to store/load/format data ;)
Please don't do that. Sooner or later you're lose the source code to your game, and you or someone else will want to republish it on some future platform, and it will prove all but impossible. Case in point: Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition.
Seriously, use standard file formats.
As for the cheating argument, if a game is purely single-player, without as much as an online leaderboard, there's no way players can "cheat". They can only experience the game as they feel fit. And you can CRC any kind of file or combination thereof anyway...
I struggled with the question too, and the only good answer I could find was: use vector and/or 2.5D graphics, to keep the game resolution-independent.
That said, you have to remember that Firefox uses hardware 2D acceleration, so to this browser it doesn't really matter how many pixels it has to push every frame (Javascript code will be the bottleneck). WebKit browsers, however, use software rendering for Canvas2D, so the size of your canvas will matter A LOT.
As for mobile devices, they have such a variety of resolutions and aspect ratios you can't really count on anything. A quick look at my website analytics seems to suggest that 1.7 is the most common aspect ratio, followed by 1.6 and 1.5. But there are still 4/3 screens out there, and even 5/4.
But! If you target desktop users at all, you can't even count on that, as you simply don't know if they keep their browser maximized. A lot of people don't these days, because it would just waste screen real estate and make websites hard to read. So what to do?
There's no hard and fast answer, but I'd just stick to 800x600, or 800x480 if I wanted widescreen, and leave it at that.
And I put them in my game Glittering Light. They're perfect for the nightmares. (You can see for yourself on itch.io and on my website.) Thank you very much!
Hi there! I'm using a handful of your sounds in my game Glittering Light. You can play it on itch.io and on my website. Thank you very much!
Hi there! I borrowed one of your coin sounds for my game Glittering Light. You can play it on itch.io and on my website. Thank you very much!
What genre are we talking about? In shooters and RPGs you have WASD for movement and the mouse for looking around/shooting/interacting. (Before the mouse, you'd have used Ctrl/Shift/Space.) And then there are the number keys for changing weapons or whatever.
Roguelikes have another preferred set of keys: hjkl for movement, w for wield/wear, e for eat and so on. And still different games have slightly different control schemes, to accomodate unique feature sets.
Other game genres... not sure. I think Metroidvanias on the PC have a somewhat standard scheme that involves the X and C keys for your character's left/right hands. You might want to look into that if you're making a platformer.
Most importantly however, think about your game's needs. Think about discoverability and ergonomics. The space bar for example is an obvious key to try when you haven't read the instructions, and it's equally accessible with both hands. Ask your friends. Ask casual gamers. (Pro tip: they won't be used to WASD, and no amount of explaining will help.) Play your own game a lot and you'll see what doesn't work. You should be fine.
Oh, and don't rely on the numpad. All those laptop users. :P
It's even easier, actually. Create your search box with <input type="search"> instead of <input type="text"> and Firefox at the very least will recognize it and offer to add it to its list of search engines in the search bar's drop-down menu.
I've had Flattr buttons on pretty much everything I put online for over a year now, and I'm yet to get one lousy tip. I gave a bunch of tips myself... and quite a few remained unclaimed. Let's be honest: nobody really uses Flattr apart from a few starry-eyed Germans.
As for WePay... it isn't something you can simply subscribe to and use directly. Is it even available for people outside of the US? (Also, I don't care what they say. Asking for your SSN? Seriously? I call a scam.)
The truth is, PayPal is an unmitigated monopoly. Nobody uses PayPal because they like or trust the service; everybody uses PayPal because it's quite literally the only game in town. If they screw you over, well, you're screwed. We'd better get used to the truth: the powers that be don't like little people being able to get paid instantly from anywhere in the world -- that's too much power in our hands. I'd recommend BitCoin instead, but that's an even bigger scam.
So thanks for the reminder, but it's not out of ignorance that people still use PayPal. For most of us, it's simply the only chance to earn even pocket money from someone who's not a shitty local employer. And unfortunately I can't live without money. It's this little bit of independence, for however long it lasts, or none at all.
These look very good, especially for procedural art. Is the code published anywhere, or do you keep it a trade secret? :P
Please don't do that. Sooner or later you're lose the source code to your game, and you or someone else will want to republish it on some future platform, and it will prove all but impossible. Case in point: Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition.
Seriously, use standard file formats.
As for the cheating argument, if a game is purely single-player, without as much as an online leaderboard, there's no way players can "cheat". They can only experience the game as they feel fit. And you can CRC any kind of file or combination thereof anyway...
I'd put some of mine here, but it's procedurally generated. I'm not even sure how source code would fit in with the rest of Open Game Art. Oh well.
I struggled with the question too, and the only good answer I could find was: use vector and/or 2.5D graphics, to keep the game resolution-independent.
That said, you have to remember that Firefox uses hardware 2D acceleration, so to this browser it doesn't really matter how many pixels it has to push every frame (Javascript code will be the bottleneck). WebKit browsers, however, use software rendering for Canvas2D, so the size of your canvas will matter A LOT.
As for mobile devices, they have such a variety of resolutions and aspect ratios you can't really count on anything. A quick look at my website analytics seems to suggest that 1.7 is the most common aspect ratio, followed by 1.6 and 1.5. But there are still 4/3 screens out there, and even 5/4.
But! If you target desktop users at all, you can't even count on that, as you simply don't know if they keep their browser maximized. A lot of people don't these days, because it would just waste screen real estate and make websites hard to read. So what to do?
There's no hard and fast answer, but I'd just stick to 800x600, or 800x480 if I wanted widescreen, and leave it at that.
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