STEROIDS is born

This is the first release of STEROIDS. This was made based on a little joke among friends. It's loosely based on ASTEROIDS. The graphics are extremely basic, by design. The gameplay is simple but extremely frustrating. I can't say I've actually beaten the game. I added temporary dev hacks to make sure the ending works.

Graphics - A friend of mine did the graphics very quickly. They were done to emulate the very simple sprite graphics of the Atari 2600 era, since ASTEROIDS for 2600 was the inspiration. On the coding side I wanted to use spritesheets and I didn't want to use any dependencies so I made a dead simple function that creates sprites from spritesheet.

Coding - I love TypeScript so this was really a fun experience for me to make a browser game with TypeScript without using any external dependencies. It's not programmed in a terribly logical way. It's program more in a get-it-done-while-the-kids-sleep way.

Mobile Support - I have tested this on Android using Chrome and Firefox. I haven't had any issues except for rendering differences. I use CSS to increase the size of the canvas. Chrome reads the "image-rendering: pixelated" CSS directive and makes the game look nice and pixely no mater how much it is scaled up, but Firefox tries to blur things to make them smoother.

GamePad Support - I wanted to be able to play the game on my phone and I hate on-screen directional pads and buttons so I programmed in gamepad support instead. I had never spent much time on gamepads in browsers before and, having implemented gamepad support in this, I can say I still haven't spent much time on it. It works, but the configuration is ugly and clunky. 

VR Support - Once gamepads worked and I could play it on my phone I decided to look into adding support for Google Cardboard so that it would look like an old game on a giant screen. I eventually figured out that A-Frame can use the game's canvas as a material applied to a plane and that plane can be used as the screen in a 3D model of a 80s era TV. That is implemented and it works and its crazy fun in my opinion. I have not included VR in the itch.io bundle yet. It's on my to-do list along with 27,412 other things.