A Simple game that is made entirely from code only. No external graphics files not external sound files. Graphics are drawn sounds are generated.

Try to find and decode the weakness on the enemy robot, then choose the correct missile to attack.

This is part of my personal challenge to create a simple game and the create variations of the game in different Programming Languages/Dialects. I am doing this out of curiosity to see what it takes to create the same thing in various languages and get the same game running on different platforms. My initial idea was always to make exactly the same game but I thought it would be more interesting if I made some changes to each version. Different enemies and advancing the plot a little bit each time.

This Version is made with Javascript+Html+Css

I chose to start with Javacript because I am very familiar with and html canvas is very easy to use together with JS . This made it easier to create what I wanted. Still I had to do some research on how to generate sound, which I had never done before.

Each version will be different and unique but will have similar gameplay.

next version I will see what c can do.

source code:https://github.com/fildubek/abr/tree/main

nice

Kudos for making a game using code only! It's nice to make a game where you understand what every line does instead of a game engine where you are building on the shoulders of giants using prefabricated functions and features.

Regarding the game itself, I played it about 3-4 times. A few observations:

-- It's not really clear what is being looked at in the main screen. It appears to be an enlarged version of the robot face? 

-- I noticed the targeting reticle moves, but I'm still not sure how that relates to selecting the right missile. Do you have to fire certain missiles when the targeting reticle is in certain spots? 

-- I figured out that the 3 bars are the Player health, but only after several playthroughs of trial and error.

-- I was able to beat the robot once. I guess I got lucky that time!

Thanks for your comment. You bring up some valid points:

1. Yes it enlarged robot face. It supposed to be a zoomed in view of the enemy robot. Basically this is done so I do not have to draw the whole robot.

2. The target is only for decoration. You cannot move it. Basically what you have to do is look on the enemy robot for a symbol/s it can small or big. This symbol/s represents a number. For example it could be an X for the Latin numeral 10, in that case the correct answer would be missile 10 or could be something else like Morse code.  It needs a bit of thinking to find the correct solution.

3. I need to make changes so that it is clearer that the bars are health.

I made a small update.

-Added text description "Energy" above the 3 bars on the right. So that it is clear, that those are energy bars.
-Add text description under enemy robot head "Target on enemy. Zoom factor 10x"

Added in the game description, a link to a hint page. For those who have difficulty figuring out what to do.

https://github.com/fildubek/abr/wiki/Hints

Small update just to fix typos.

A screenshot of the game in the programming language C. Still Work in Progress

Finally Part 2 of challenge is done and the C version is released. At the moment there is only Linux binary available for download, it requires Simple DirectMedia Layer to be installed on the System. This version is quite different, using mouse driven menus instead of keyboard.

Analysis

So this was a lot more difficult than I thought. The first Problem that I faced was which library should I use to draw the graphics. Most online tutorials recommended to use the graphics.h library, since it is easy to use. The problem was I wanted the code to run both on Linux and windows but unfortunately even though there some Linux implementations of the library, I could not get them to worked at all, with exception of one worked but it kept crashing after a few seconds with a long list of errors. After several hours trying to debug it I gave up.            

        Next try was the Allegro Library. This looked very promising and was cross platform but I had problems getting to display text with fonts properly, so eventually I gave up on that also.    Then I remembered SDL so I switched to that, SDL is also a cross platform library. So I started to working with that on my Linux system which is my main system. I managed draw the graphics easily with SDL. But when I tried to display text, again it did not work properly, not sure this kept happening bot with Allegro and SDL. This time though instead of trying out something different again, I came up with a work around, so instead of text directly on the window, I used menus to display the text info and instructions. The resulted a big change in the gameplay of the game and instead being a game that is using the keyboard for commands, it now uses mouse controlled menus for everything.    

          Next was the sound, I found on stackoverflow a good example on how to generated sound with SDL, so I did not need to find another Library for sound generation.  I adapted the code I found for game and soon afterwards I had a fully working version of the game I had initially written in Javascript, now in running in C.        

            Then it was time to compile it for windows, since I used cross platform libraries, I did not think I would face any difficulties. I was wrong, when I tried to compile the code, there were several errors. All errors were related to the sound generation code I took from stackoverflow. So took another close look at it and found that I previously had not noticed that it had some C++ code it that was not compatible with C.          

               No idea why I had not issue compiling it on Linux. Anyway after a while I figured out how to modify the code to work with a C compiler. Now the these error where gone on windows but new errors came up. Even though the compiler could find the SDL library, it could still not use it for some reason.      At that moment I temporary gave up on releasing it on Windows. Instead decided to release the Linux binary and the source code and take another look at the windows problem another time. This is why at the moment there is only a Linux binary available.

Next version part 3 we will see if Python can bite.

I compiled part 3 of advance battle robot python using cx-freeze and created a raspberry pi executable. Itch.io is not letting me add more executable files to the project so I will add link here. I have also added it to the game description.

Still working on c++ version, I am trying to learn to use the SFML graphics library but I find how everything strange and confusing so it will more time until this is finished.

It has been a while since I wrote an update. I am still working on the c++ version slowly because I am busy with other stuff but I am getting closer finishing the game. This version we be the first to have color instead of being black and white.