GOAL: The goal of the game is to combine puppies to create bigger ones. Be careful, though. Puppies are not allowed out of their playpen. If thye get out (stay above the red line for more than 2 seconds after being dropped in), the game is over.
ORIGINATION: My wife, Dana, loves games like this. However, she hates ads. I don't blame her, I do too. So, I made this game for her. I don't get any money for you playing this game. Feel free to send me an amazon card, I won't turn it down.
FEEDBACK: Constructive criticism, bug reports, and bragging can be shared with me at puppy@dpitts.com.
INTERESTING NOTES ABOUT THE GAME:
INTERFACE
On the game over page, you can select each of the puppies to get its name (they are chihuahua, teacup poodle, yorkie, toy fox terrier, pug, frenchie, boston terrier, corgie, beagle, border collie, boxer, labrador, golden retriever, german shepherd, rottweiler, great dane and mastiff). Very few players have seen any puppy after the labrador.
Firedog (the dalmation with the FD hat on) never gets dropped. He is there at the beginning of the game and there again if you make the top 5. Otherwise you never see him.
Scores - when you combine puppies, you get a score. The score is based on what was combined. The chihuahua gets 1 point, the points double each time up to 16 for the pug. They then go up by 16 each. So, combining two corgies, as example, gets you 64 points. That pattern remains until you get to the mastiff. The great dane is worth 192 points, but the mastiff, if you ever combine them, gets you double at 384 points!
ART AND SOUND
All puppies are 512x512 pixel images. I added the balloons around them and set the background to be transparent. The game takes these and turns the squares into circles each time.
Google's AI helped me with the images of the puppies. I manipulated the images in GIMP, including adding the balloons. Sorry about my poor GIMP skills.
Many of the non-puppy images are standard icons. This includes the paws (🐾), bone (🦴) fire (🔥), doggie bowl (🥣), steak (🥩), the 1st, second, and 3rd place trophies (🥇, 🥈, 🥉), and others (🦮, 🐕🦺, 🏠, 👑, 🔇, 🔊, 💿, 🎵, ❤️, 📺, ⚠️, 🧹)
All the sounds came from pixabay (https://pixabay.com/). They have royalty free images and sounds.
DEVELOPMENT
I've previously done a little bit of coding in JavaScript, but this is my first time using phaser. I'm currently using version 3.60. There are later versions, but I want to finish with this version before tackling an upgrade.
This is my first time trying to write/publish to mobile devices. It costs money to put games in the stores, so I certainly won't do that anytime soon - if ever.
The about page and the configscene page are separate phaser scenes. The game over page is not. This is due to a function of my learning curve. The game over page should be a separate scene and may be a change in later versions if I am so inclined.
I used Google's AI and the visio studio code ai helpers to assist me with coding. I learned a lot about both during this process - some very good, some not so good. Particularly early on, I did a lot of vibe coding. I gave descriptions and/or pseudo code, and it gave me back javascript. Again, sometimes with very good results and other times not so much.
For this project I learned how to encode pictures to base64 and to have them in my code instead of as separate files.
GAME SPECS
The game is 450x750 pixels. This is so it fits well on my wife's phone.
Height breakdown:
0 to 95 px: The Dark Header Bar (Score, Best Score, and Doghouse preview).
95 px: The CONTAINER_TOP deadline (where dogs hang out before dropping).
95 to 700 px: The playable drop zone (605 pixels of free-fall height).
700 to 750 px: The Matte Floor Base (thickness of 50px)
Width breakdown
Left wall edge ends at X = 20.
Right wall edge starts at X = 430.
This leaves 410 width of playable area
Playpen dimensions: 605 pixels tall, 410 pixels wide.
The only external call is to the phaser JavaScript - everything else for the game is self contained in the one html file.
Play area - the playpen is actually 410 pixels wide because of the edging and it is
The smallest puppy has a radius of 15 pixels. The largest, a radius of 89. So, will the Mastiff fix - yes, it will, but good luck doing so!!
The Mastiff has a radius of 89 pixels, which means its total diameter is 178 pixels. So, two of them would be 356 pixels. If they are side by side, this leaves 54 pixels. However, puppies, unless at the very bottom, are rarely side by side. At 356 pixels, they still have 251 pixels of free vertical space if they were on top of each other. Again, they fit, but good luck doing so!