Bullet Hell Survive Alpha

I'll start off with the basics: getting a player sprite on screen and moving it around with the keyboard. To do this I will use an HTML file with a canvas element as the screen and then a handful of JavaScript to set up and control everything. The player sprite will be an HTML image element that can then be copied to the canvas to display it, and user control will be taken care of by listening to keyboard events. There will be a timer to synchronise things and run the main game loop. You can get the source code by looking at this tag in the git repository on BitBucket . If you clone the repo then you can just double click on the index.html file to play it in your browser. You can also follow this link  (or click on the gif above) to run things directly in your browser without having to download anything first. Let's talk through the code now. First, the HTML:

Hey! Here's my blog about creating a browser based shoot-em-up game. The game, called Bullet Hell Survive Alpha, is an idea that I've played with a couple of times before over the years. It started off as something that I wrote for a gamejam when I worked at Denki , way back in 2008. It's a game genre that I really like and has got lots of great feedback each time I talk about it - it's still one of the subjects that gets the most hits over on my main blog at http://evilpaul.org . The game itself is a little different to your usual shoot-em-up - the aim here is simply to survive the bullet hell onslaught and to score points as you go. It's not about blasting your way though levels, finding enemies weak-points and exploiting them.. it's purely about dodging the beautiful patterns of bullets. It's part reflexes, part pattern recognition. One of the most interesting things, for me, will be building the levels. Making bullet patterns that are both beautifu...