Tag : playcraft

Crafting Pong: Physical Challenge

Posted on: 2012-12-02 /
Categories: Code, Pong Kombat, Projects

This is the third part of a series of articles documenting my experience with building a Pong clone in the Playcraft Engine for JavaScript. Looking for Part I or Part II?

In the previous post, we were able to get entities moving around the screen, simply by updating it’s spatial position in increments. However, everything is just drawn without regard to other entities on the screen. In order to make things collide, we need to add a Physics component to our entities, so we can take advantage of all the great functionality included with Playcraft. The physics component requires a physics system to be added to the layer, so we’ll start with updating our GameplayLayer to include it. I added a debug flag to mine, just because I think it looks cool while I’m developing. It comes in handy when things are rotating.

Crafting Pong: Making Things Move

Posted on: 2012-12-01 /
Categories: Code, Pong Kombat, Projects

This is the second part of a series of articles documenting my experience with building a Pong clone in the Playcraft Engine for JavaScript. Looking for Part I or Part III?

In the first post, we were able to modify the sample project included with Playcraft and render all the various entities on the screen. This works out well for smaller projects, but I found it to become a bit cumbersome dealing with all the logic in a single game.js file. While, in the long run, having everything in a single file is ideal (reducing HTTP requests), for development, I like to keep my logic separated.

Crafting Pong in Playcraft JS

Posted on: 2012-11-30 /
Categories: Code, Pong Kombat, Projects

This is the first part of a series of articles documenting my experience with building a Pong clone in the Playcraft Engine for JavaScript. Looking for Part II or Part III?

For about six months, I had been working on building a JavaScript engine for my Pong Kombat resurrection project. My previous attempts were using pre-built engines, like XNA and Cocos 2D, but in the web world, the engines I had been researching weren’t a good fit for me, for a variety of reasons. If there’s one thing I learned during those six months, it was that there is a lot of stuff involved in building an engine that is optimized for it’s platform.