MICAH MATEO VARGAS
Game Developer
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Game Development
Perlenspiel
JavaScript
Aseprite
1
Developer
3 months
3
2 weeks
Perlenspiel defines itself as a "gameclavier, a software instrument for studying and composing digital games".
By limiting itself to a maximum grid of 32x32 colored squares, the intention is to promote the creation of quick complete games.
Coded in JavaScript, I created three different projects with three different goals.
All these games can be played online, click the images above or use: Mazes, Wizard VS Dragons, or Collectathon.
The most technical of the three projects was a maze procedural generation project. By navigating to the green goal as the red square, the player proceeds to the next "level" or screen. Each screen is a freshly generated square maze, starting at 7x7 and going up to 32x32.
These mazes were generated using Primm's Algorithm. I chose to do my custom implementation using specifically this algorithm for two major reasons. Firstly, Primm's Algorithm has a tendency to produce long halways with many sprouting dead-ends. Secondly, it produces a maze where all traversable nodes are connected (meaning there's no disconnected areas).
The most creative of the projects was a metaphor game. A more traditional game with the simple objective of making the player feel like a wizard in aerial combat with dragons. On the creative side, I made a simple system for the player to teleport between clouds, summon a portal, and collect fireballs with it. Working within the confines of colored cells with perlenspiel, I had to create a custom implementation for the sprites and animations I was using. As I've had experience with engine development (see Sharkbyte), implementing these features was familiar.
The first game I created was a hyper-casual arcade-style collecting game.
The player can launch upwards out of a orange box, collecting yellow squares along the way, before having to land back into the launcher.
This game was created to "de-make" (or simplify to it's base mechanic) the Donkey-Kong banna collecting barrel minigames and to learn perlenspiel.
For this game, I created two versions a truly simplified version where the launcher was only a single square and an easy mode with a more forgivingly sized launcher to land back into.
Try either or both: Simplified Version and Easier Version.