You won’t see it… but everything is about to change under the hood. I’m cooking up a complete overhaul of the boilerplate code I’ve been building since my very first Ludum Dare (LD47). It’s grown organically over time, but now it’s time to turn it into something bigger. Cleaner. Sharper. Sharable. The plan? To release it for everyone to use. No promises, just dreams :-) Working title: PelPurrfect For anyone who is interested, here's a taste of what’s hopefully coming next LD. This page is a living document and will be updated as the project trucks along.
🖥️ Smarter Screens
- [x] Dynamic resolutions & aspect ratios (now its fixed and 1:1)
- [x] Dynamic scaling (zoom in, zoom out, no worries)
- [ ] Fullscreen mode that does the F11-pressing on behalf of the player
- [x] Ambient YouTube-style background vibes, just because I like it so much
💥 Collision System: Revamped
- [x] Decouple your collision resolution from screen resolution
- [ ] Add collision zones around objects to enhance performance
- [ ] Colliders return unique lists of collided objects instead of reacting directly (you stay in control)
- [x] Optional on-screen rendering of the collision map (debugging just got visual)
🖱️ GUI, But Make It Easy
- Mouse coords in 3 flavors: pixel-perfect, screen-scaled, and collisionmap-scaled
- Input events with clarity: button is up/down vs just went up/down
- Anchoring for UI elements: no more broken layouts on resize
- Text-on-a-grid: line spacing without the headaches
🧩 Level Design with a Twist
- Levels defined in PNGs, compiled to sidestep HTML headache inducing canvas fingerprinting issues
- Auto-recompile of levels when PNG is newer than its definition files
- Level-specific config & variables (re)load dynamically
🎮 Rendering Gets Fancy
- Multiple render modes: topdown, sideview, 2.5D raycasting
- Maybe isometric or hex-based if I have time and energy to add that
🏆 Highscore System: Locked and loaded
- More secure POST-based submissions, instead of GET based submissions
- Async GET for reliable fetching of scores
- Server config for tuning: max scores, sorting, etc.
- Auto-create scoreboards when none are present
- A proper set-it-and-forget-it system, so you can consider it a last-minute addition
🐛 Debugging Like a Pro
- A magical debug file. Delete it, and poof: all debug code disables.
- A magical release file, that disables automatic rebuilding of levels and TS to JS conversion
🧠 Quality-of-Life stuff
- Everything split into tidy files, both client- and serverside
- Full TypeScript conversion
- Clear documentation + a quick reference/cheatsheet
- Setup wizard, that asks some questions about what kind of game you would like (top down? mouse driven? what controls? etc)
- Templates for things like player movement, collisions, common used menuscreens etc.
- A basic audio/music handler
This isn’t just a cleanup: it’s a foundation. For me, for you. For anyone who loves deep level of coding a game while not using an actual engine.
Any suggestions for a name is appreciated! Also, I like lists