zero+

zero+ is a HTML5 browser based online multiplayer arena game built on Phaser. Players can choose up to 4 heroes with different attributes and skills to pit against others in the arena.

Current features:

• Basic game states: Boot, Main menu, Options, Credits, Character select, Multiplayer
• Tilemap and spritesheets support, anyone can create their own maps and characters by using the tools noted in our documentation
• Four fully animated heroes, each with unique animations to suit their characters
• Basic hero mechanics such as movement, health, skills, cool downs, damage, respawn system
• Hero HUD showing health and skill cool downs
• Simple free for all where everyone's objective is just to kill everyone else
• Bare minimum tutorial where players are shown the controls in the character select screen
• Online multiplayer hosted on Azure, currently serves as a persistent server where players can join in whenever they want.
• Server broadcast messages where every player will be notified when someone has joined or left the game, or if they have died.
• Dummy leaderboard that shows the list of players and their current health

Planned features:

• Skills and balance for all heroes
• Team deathmatch game mode (MVP)
• Team mechanics
• Game mechanics
• Hero and skill levels
• Lobby hosting and joining game sessions
• Allowing users to create their own game room where they could play privately with friends.
• Cross platform
  • Providing support to mobile devices for the game
  • Allowing users on mobile device to play with users on web platforms.
  • Can explore electron

Installation

zero+ uses the following to work properly:

• node.js - evented I/O for the backend
• Express - fast node.js network app framework
• engine.io - implementation of transport-based cross-browser/cross-device bi-directional communication layer for socket.io
• eureca.io - a node.js bidirectional RPC library using Primus.io as a network layer.

Install node.js and the following:

$ npm install express
$ npm install engine.io
$ npm install eureca.io

To run the game, navigate to /core, run "node server.js" in your terminal and open up "localhost:8000" in your browser.

Tools used

• Tiled
  • For generating tilemap json files
  • Tile layer format must be set to "CSV"
  • Tile size should be the same when creating a new map and when importing new tilesets
  • Important to keep track of the name of the layers as they are referenced when creating a layer in Phaser, can check with json file to make sure.
• Leshy SpriteSheet Tool
  • For generating spritesheets and spritemaps
  • Json file type must be set to "JSON-TP-Array"
  • Naming convention should be standardized as Phaser can generate frome names automatically by providing the correct suffix such as "Anim_Run" and a range of numbers. For example, for example ('Anim_Run', 0, 9) will produce an array ['Anim_Run0', 'Anim_Run1', ... ... ,'Anim_Run9'] so adding it to the animations is a lot simpler.