Homebound
In 2014, I joined the Gamedev StackExchange Anniversary Game Jam. My entry was a small game called Homebound. All code on GitHub.
My description from back then:
Guide your crew home by programming your spaceship to reach that distant wormhole. Don't get too close to the planets or their gravity will crash you. Try to win with the fastest time, shortest script, lowest fuel expenditure, or most acrobatically awesome gravity assist! Gameplay is self-explanatory.
The way it worked: you were assigned 5 themes, from which you picked 3, and built a game around that in a weekend (or in my case, a few hours). My themes were: Meta, Wormhole, Tactical, Unity, Bears. Try to guess which ones I picked!
The maps were randomly generated, and the code was pure Javascript with no libraries (the kind of thing I was proud of back then). Back then, you could host static pages straight off of Dropbox if you put them in your Public folder, so I did that a lot, including for this game and all its assets. Dropbox removed that feature a long time ago, so I recently revived the game and put it on GitHub pages instead. You can play it here or right here on this page!
Amar Memoranda > Homebound
Yousef Amar
Log
Homebound: an old game jam project revived
Around two months ago, I was talking to a friend about these games that involve programming in some form (mainly RTSs where you program your units). Some examples of these are:
- https://leekwars.com
- https://codingame.com
- https://spacetraders.io
- https://screeps.com
- The various normal games that let you program AI players
Needless to say, I'm a fan of these games. However, during that conversation, I suddenly remembered: I made a game like this once! I had completely forgotten that for a game jam, I had made a simple game called Homebound. You can learn more about it at that link!
At the time, you could host static websites off of Dropbox by simply putting your files in the Public folder. That no longer worked, so the link was broken. I dug everywhere for the project files, but just couldn't find them. I was trying to think if I was using git or mercurial back then and where I could have put them. I think it's likely I didn't bother because it was something small to put out in a couple of hours.
Eventually, in the depths of an old hard drive, I found a backup of my old Dropbox folder, and in that, the Homebound source code! Surprisingly, it still worked perfectly in modern browsers (except for a small CSS tweak) and it now lives on GitHub pages.
Then, I forgot about this again (like this project is the Silence), until I saw the VisionScript project by James, which reminded me of making programming languages! So I decided to create a project page for Homebound here.
I doubt I will revisit this project in the future, but I might play with this mechanic again in the context of other projects. In that case, I might add to this devlog to reference that. I figured I should put it out there for posterity regardless!