Age of the Demigods Post-Mortem
This is my main entry for js13k 2023
even though I have submitted 2 others(Mainly side projects for fun and not polished).
When Theme got released I immidiately thought of a role-playing game. I could have made it about a soldier or a king
but at the time I was reading Percy Jackson Books so I got inspired to make a RPG where you play as hercules.
I originally intended the game to have 6 'chapters' but I ran out of space quite early because of all of the sprites. At the end I decided to stop at just 4 and make a nice ending!
The whole game is made with vanilla javascript and some basic html! This meant that most my code wasnt at all optimized and the size of the main.js file alone came to be above 70KB! Seeing this I spent about half the competition just minifying my code, compressing images, removing some parts of the game etc. At the end my .zip file was still about 23KB. Luckily I found an awesome trick for reducing the size alot. Up until this point I used my systems standard compression but I realised this was set to just -6 compression (the maximum being -9) so I found a handy terminal command that reduced the file size to just below 13300 bytes; Extra Compress On Mac Command = : zip -9 -r main.zip FolderName.
There were some bugs and glitches that I didn't have time/space to fix:
The touchscreen buttons zooming in at times, Multiple bosses spawning on mission 7, Player getting stuck on steps during mission 8 with no way to restart, Touch controls sometimes trigering promts such as ('it's rock') or ('it's grass') etc
There were ALOT of bugs and I fixed Most of them but these are the ones that ended up in the game js13k release.
The rest are 'mostly' fixed in the itch.io release! but I did not change anything about the game itself such as the music, the bosses and the story as I wanted it to be for the most part same as the one released to Js13k
I ended up publishing it without adding animations that work for mobile as I did not want it to lag but the itch.io version does include animations for mobile and a sound effect for when you jump!
Post Comp:
On the itch.io version I have made it to be full screen as per Poppular Feedback and removed the car in mission 2 as to fit with this years theme (13nth century (even if i interpreted it as 13nth century BC)).
Things I did not change: I did not change the music and prompts (Which was also Poppular Feedback as I wanted it to be mostly simmillar in terms of the submission on Js13k .
Theme:
This year I went with a different approach as not much interesting stuff happened in the 13nth century so instead I decided to Interpret the theme as 13nth century BC (When hercules was born). The Js13k version included a car which needed fuel as chapter 2. I think I had just gone completely mad to have implemented this 😵💫 but I removed it in the itch.io version !
Overall, I was really Happy with the entry and I will continue to submit for the following years!
