PETSCII
PETSCII is a text-based point-and-click adventure written in JavaScript. It was inspired by Candy Box and was my game jam submission for Virtual Pet Jam. I used HTML as the graphical canvas, so it was a fun and novel way for me to make a game.
Project Purpose and Goal
I found Virtual Pet Jam when I was browsing itch.io's game jams page, and after some brainstorming I came up with the clever name "PETSCII", a mashup of "pet" and "ASCII". Candy Box was the first ASCII game that came to my mind, so I decided to use it as the inspiration for this project.
Tech Stack Explanation
Since I wanted it to be in the style of Candy Box, the decision to use just HTML and JavaScript was a restriction to challenge myself. ASCII sprites were stored as text files, and the cooking recipes were stored in JSON.
Problems and Thought Process
This was my first time making a game in the browser, and without any HTML5 game engine too, so it was a bit of a challenge to structure my code in an easily extendable manner. Generally, I separated code between logical sections of the game, such as the menu, PDA, and cookbook.
Rendering graphics was its own challenge as well. The solution I came up with was to store ASCII art in separate text files, including any sections of text inside sprites. I then wrote a JS function that would let me define areas of these sprites as buttons to give it interactivity.
Lessons Learned
I learned a lot over the course of this game jam, and I applied some of the knowledge along the way by refactoring my code to be cleaner and easier to extend.
If I were to come back to this game, I would leverage JSON significantly more to store additional data such as dialog, animations, buttons, and game states outside of code. I would also develop an ASCII canvas system to handle rendering sprites and animations.
Get In Touch
Feel free to reach out if you're looking for a game
developer, have a question, or just want to connect.
Designed & Built by Chai Latier