Last year I entered the Extra Credits jam, and decided on making a game about John Snow and the Cholera epidemic in London during the mid-19th century. I limited the color palette to CGA, aiming for an old PC retro look. Other than that--- I used Phaser for the engine, and Gimp/Aesprite for graphics.

But, I simply lost motivation.  My desire was for the game to be used as a reference for historical and educational purposes, but I'm honestly not an expert in 19th-century English debates, so I got lost on the trivia game-mechanic (scope-creep) but my arrogance refuses to allow the story/trivia to be dropped (artistic vision?) Anyways, I updated the game to its current state on itch for everyone (and no-one) to play, experiment, give feedback: 

https://supersleepygrumpybear.itch.io/john-snow-ec-jam

My goals for the jam will be to complete the trivia/story mechanic, make a title screen, make music/sfx, and overall, just polish, polish, polish

Been coming back here and there to this project, and finally decided to share an update (copy-pasted from the devlog) :

Day 9 (and 10) - Time for an update

Alot of code refactoring and sprite redesigns. Working through the game files I laid it out into three (somewhat) large codebases. Partly lazy, partly javascript old school designs, I quickly found lots of spaghetti lines like these:

case 'KeyA': {
  this.allCityCells.forEach(cell => {
    if (cell.deathCounterSprites.length) {
      cell.deathCounterSprites.removeAll();
      cell.deathCounters.forEach(counter => {
        if (counter[2].includes(['flu']))
          cell.deathCounterSprites.add(this.scene.add.image(counter[0], 
                                                            counter[1], 
                                                            'black_dot').setOrigin(0))
      });
    }
  });
  break;
}

…And this is for keyboard inputs, so every key had lines of code wrapped around it. First I abstracted the forEach code block into a method class of the city class.

removeFalseBlackDots(type){
  this.allCityCells.forEach(cell => {
    if (cell.deathCounterSprites.length) {
      cell.deathCounterSprites.removeAll();
      cell.deathCounters.forEach(counter => {
        if (counter[2].includes(type))
          cell.deathCounterSprites.add(this.scene.add.image(counter[0], counter[1], 'black_dot').setOrigin(0))
      });
    }
  });
}

This line is too long and also needs its own method,

cell.deathCounterSprites.add(this.scene.add.image(counter[0], 
                                                  counter[1], 
                                                  'black_dot').setOrigin(0))

createDot(cell, counter, color){
  cell.deathCounterSprites.add(
    this.scene.add.image(counter[0],counter[1],'black_dot').setOrigin(0)
  );
},

good enough for now. Makes the code more reusable as I implement better ways to communicate gameplay mechanics to the player. Or something idk. Anyone who’s curious and reading this can ask me what the code does in Phaser and javascript.

Trouble in Paradise

Of course, after all this, I finally decided to update my files ٭(•﹏•)٭ and

unexpected behavior. The pictures should be removed and hidden. After looking through the API, old forum posts, and the github notes, I asked about the issue on Discord. Long-story- well not so long- I’d been using Phaser.Containers to handle the dialogue logic, and Containers have a few issues open on github that correlate with this bug. Sooooo— I just need to redo the container logic. I shouldn’t have coded it in a way where the same container is used to place the text dynamically. I already have a dialogue class, so I just need to redo the class to take more dynamic parameters and delete the text when the event is done.

Eazy Peezy