Long Drive

Long Drive Introduction

This is a fun thing I've spent a lot of the month working on, and although I didn't get everything I wanted into it I think it's quite meditative and has a lot of potential if I wanted to take the idea further later.

Essentially it's a map that you draw by clicking on the next node you want to visit - each time you click on a node, you see the next three nodes you could visit from there. If you don't like where you've ended up, you can backtrack to previous nodes and try a different path.

You can use the map to plot cities or planets in a story, or zoom out a bit and use it to draw a shape, or just click away and see where it takes you. Apologies for the extremely rudimentary name generation, I threw it together in a few minutes.

Control notes

• WASD move the camera around
• Left click selects the next node, and centres that node in the camera
• Mouse scroll (or J/K) zooms in and out
• N shows/hides node names
• M shows/hides the signature/title in the bottom corner
• Right click/'Save image as' allows you to save a snapshot of what you've done directly from the browser (of course you could take a normal screenshot instead)
• Spacebar shows/hides debug information but there's not much interesting there

Commentary

I'm super pleased with this one. It's another step towards feeling like I can just build stuff myself in the browser, rather than needing libraries to do so much of it. I like building stuff! I've basically been carrying forward some general-use functionality like update/draw loops and other utilities through these few JS games I've made, and it feels like despite their very basic looks I am getting more competent at putting what I want onscreen using just plain JavaScript. Which is cool!

I hope you enjoy a long drive of your own. 

#onegameamonth January 2020