A game about chemical names and formulas.
You have to choose the formula corresponding to the displayed chemical name. Make your highest score!
At school I have to learn many chemical names with their formulas, so I thought the best way to learn was by playing a game. I also wanted to help my friends and my classmates, so I made the game in French.
I started developing the game using Rust and macroquad, since I wanted it to be fast, safe and quick to program (and because I'm currently learning Rust). Also, macroquad's design is similar to raylib, which I used in my previous repositories.
I was unable to target the game to wasm. There was multiple errors because of the js file I had to import from macroquad's repository.
Moreover, assets management seemed different between desktop Rust app and wasm one (if I had used the macro include_bytes!("image.png"), the game would
have been heavier and longer to load).
I was a bit frustrated, because I wanted to develop the game once and run it everywhere, and macroquad is told to be cross-platform. I was looking for another Rust game library/game engine, but the ones I found seemed too different or too complex. For instance, Bevy uses systems and plugins, as well as OOP. I was losing macroquad's simplicity and functional pattern. I did not want to spend more time learning how to use a new library than developing the game. At least, with all those reasearches I discovered the website Are we game yet?.
Thanks to this Polymars' video, I discovered kaboom, a JS library to create simple video games. So I decided to give it a try, and I made a simpler version of the game.
You cannot use ttf fonts with kaboom. Instead, you have to use bitmap fonts. However, I could not find one that supported subscripts and superscripts, which was necessary for the chemical formulas. I tried first to analyze each character of the formulas to place the special one a bit higher or lower (as subscripts or superscripts), but the result was not the same for all the formulas. Therefore I used an online LaTeX equation editor to create formulas' images. It works, but the rendering is a bit distorted.
Another problem I found is file management. Indeed, I did not find a simple way of reading external files (without using node.js, because I did not want my game to be heavy).
I used the fetch api to load files, which works pretty well, and kaboom supports ttf files, so you can display superscripts and subscripts (if the font supports it).
If you want to download the source code and test the game on your browser. You need to setup a local server, otherwise kaboom will not be able to load images.
To do so, type this command:
python3 -m http.serverThen follow the link the program displays.
To add new formulas and chemical names, you can refer to this file.
This project is under MIT License (refer to the LICENSE file for more details).
In addition to the license conditions, you have to credit the artists who made the sound effects and the musics, which I did in the credits file.
Feel free to use this project as an inspiration for your quizz games.