Afterlight Caves

Created by Cole Granof, Joseph Petitti, and Matthew Puentes

This is a cool game where you shoot procedurally generated enemies in procedurally generated caves. Try it online at afterlightcaves.com or download a desktop application from the releases page.

Try it out

The best way to try out this project is to run a Node server that serves the static content. With Node.js installed, do this:

$ git clone https://github.com/bandaloo/afterlight-caves
$ cd afterlight-caves
$ npm install
$ npm start

Then point your favorite browser to http://localhost:4000 to try it out.

Development

We use no front-end dependencies, everything in the static directory can be run as plain JavaScript in a modern browser. We use ES6 modules directly since they've been in the standard for a long time now.

We wrote all the engine code, game logic, and graphics from scratch using nothing but JavaScript. We use the HTML canvas API for graphics and various other standard web APIs for input and sound.

We also use the Prettier code formatter to simplify code style decisions.

Build a production version

The JavaScript syntax we use is only supported by very recent browsers. To build a version that is compatible with older and more obscure browsers, use the build script:

$ npm run build

This uses Babel to transpile our scripts to ES5, then bundles them with Browserify and writes the output to the dist directory. You can tell the server to serve files from the dist directory instead of static by doing this:

$ node index.js --compat

If you want to run the score server on a different domain from the static site content, just set the SCORE_SERVER_SCHEME and SCORE_SERVER_DOMAIN variables in build-prod.js, and score requests will be made to the custom score server URL in the production version.

The start-compat npm script builds and serves from the dist directory automatically:

$ npm run start-compat

Desktop version

If you just want to run the game on your desktop as a standalone application, download a build for your operating system on the releases page.

To build a desktop version yourself, the following script will make a build for all support operating systems in the release-builds directory:

$ npm run package-desktop

You can also package an RPM file for RedHat-compatible systems like Fedora, CentOS, and OpenSUSE:

$ npm run package-rpm

To run the desktop application without building an executable, do this:

$ npm run build-electron
$ npm run start-electron

Testing

We use Mocha and Chai in the browser to run tests with ES6 modules. This was set up with the help of this article.

The easiest way to run the tests is to launch a local server and open tests.html in your browser.

Music credits

• "cavedive" by Mason Granof