I made an interactive website for the band Bad Shapes! This virtual art installation features the self titled album by Bad Shapes and generative visual art set in a realistic 3D scene.
The legendary JavaScript competition JS1k was thought to have ended, but it has risen from it’s ashes in the form of JS1024! This competition for making tiny JavaScript programs has been going on for 10 years and will now be continuing under a new name. Thank you to the organizers and other participants, you should definitely check out some of the other entries.
JavaScript provides a powerful though simple audio library, the Web Audio API. I first explored it while developing ZzFX, a tiny sound effect system. For while I’ve been itching to make some musical instruments. This demo works much differently from ZzFX, mostly using the oscillator and gain nodes.
In this post I will go through every single line of my 1 kilobyte piano and explain how some of the trickier parts work. The whole thing is open source on GitHub and has a some improvements since my JS1024 submission. So please continue reading and let’s make sweet music together!
Here’s 1Keys running live in a CodePen for you to mess around with. It can be played with either the mouse or keyboard.
Months ago, when I heard that the legendary JS1k game jam would not be continuing, I talked it over with some other devs and decided to help fill the void we would host a 2k game jam on itch called 2kPlus Jam. The primary goal of this comp was to create a game that fits entirely in a 2 kilobyte zip file. That is incredibly small, for point of reference a 3.5 floppy disk could hold over 700 of these games.
My entry, Hue Jumper, is an homage to 80’s racing game rendering technology. The 3D graphics and physics engine was implemented from scratch in pure JavaScript. I also spent ungodly hours tweaking the gameplay and visuals.
The theme for the game jam was “Shift” which I incorporated by shifting the hue for the world’s color when the player crosses a checkpoint. I imagined that crossing a checkpoint was fictionally like shifting or jumping into a new dimension with a different hue, which is how I came up with the name “Hue Jumper”.
This post is going to be a bit long because it contains the JavaScript code for my game in it’s entirety. The code is already well commented so I’m not going to explain every line of it nor are you expected to read through all the code now. Instead my goal is to explain how it works, why I made it this way, and walk you through the overall structure. This same code is on CodePen for you to play around with live. So please continue reading, buckle up, and hold onto your butts!
