Dragon Canyon Has Been Updated

zacharyMar 18, 2014

These updates were not too extremely necessary, but I felt like I should make them at some point. And the last few days have been that “some point”. So here is the rundown on Dragon Canyon‘s updates.

These were some updates that I wanted to put into the game since I created it. I didn’t think the game was right when it was first released and wanted to make a few changes.

The first one was just the size of the game window. It was way too wide. I needed to scale that back considerably. The game play just didn’t lend itself to such a wide area. If the game were to be released as a four player game, I could easily see a much wider game area to be a necessity.

The next update was a simple high score mechanism. The game now tracks your personal best score, in the current play session. If you refresh the browser window or close it, your score will be lost. But it will at least let you challenge yourself a bit better.

The final update is one that it badly needed, pixel perfect collision detection. The game originally just used hit boxes based on the size of the sprite. This led to a lot of transparent pixels overlapping transparent pixels causing a collision. This led to a lot of awful deaths and some seriously crazy shots. So now, the actual opaque portions have to overlap to count as a hit. Much better.

If I were to make this into a full fledged game, I would certainly add more. I would like it to be multiplayer. That would require more monsters and a larger play area. I also need scrolling backgrounds. Multiple levels with their own monsters and backgrounds. A greater variety of monsters with a greater variety of attack patterns would be awesome. This would also include monsters that shoot back. Boss monsters would add another bit of flair. Controller support would be great as playing multiplayer on a single keyboard just doesn’t work right. I would also add health and special attacks. This would make the game more interesting a varied. Of course I would also add animations, sound effects and music to the list too.

Come to think of it, this is pretty far from a “complete” game.