Fleet Postmortem

Fleet is one of the first Java games that I wrote. As the game was written in Java, and Kotlin is a replacement to Java which can compile to JavaScript, I decided to see how well Kotlin works for HTML5 games. The create.js library was used for handling the GUI aspects of the game. To make the game more playable on tablets, I had to rework the user interface quite a bit which makes this more of a re-write than port.

Fleet was released on Spelchan.com on June 1st and is based on the classic pen and paper game that is now played on a board with easily lost plastic pieces. You control a fleet of ships. You have an opponent who also controls a fleet of ships. Your goal is to destroy your opponents fleet of ships before your opponent can destroy your fleet of ships.

What Went Wrong

In the original Fleet, ship placement was done one ship at a time with the player using the space bar to rotate the ships. As I wanted this to work on touch-only devices this meant that requiring a key stroke was out of the question. Dragging the ships around to move them seemed like the ideal touch-based controls. Double-clicking on a ship to rotate the ship became the obvious solution for ship orientation.

While create.js does have some support for drag-and-drop, I still had to write a fair bit of code to get this to work. Getting it working with the mouse was easy but for some reason it would not work on the tablets that I have access to. I finally searched on-line for any information where I discovered that you had to enable touch by using the Touch class. Seconds later I was running it fine on my tablet, but my Dad's older tablet ran very poorly and inconsistently. While I suspect that this is predominantly due to the age and slow speed of the device, I decided it would be a good idea to have the initial layout of the player's ship be randomly generated just like the AI ships so that if a player was having problems moving ships around, they could just go with the default random layout.

Testing the dragging and dropping of ships resulted in the ship often not going where the player was expecting due to the way the sprite snapped to the grid. One solution to this problem was to simply have the grid snapping happen as you dragged the ship but this simply did not feel right. The original version would highlight the grid squares where you were going to place a ship in white or red so I figured that I would do the same thing here but opted for yellow and red. This took a bit of work to accomplish but I think the results are quite nice.

Mixed Blessings

Kotlin is a rather new language that came to the scene more as an alternative to Java programming on Android but with the ability to compile to JVM, JavaScript, or Native it has a lot of potential. I started my Atari 2600 project to try out the language where I found myself enjoying the language. I wanted to see if it could be used for porting games so decided that as Fleet was originally written in Java, it would be a good contender.

One of the nice features of Kotlin is that you are able to use the "native" features of the platform you are compiling to so a JavaScript project can make use of JavaScript libraries and other native features. This has to be specified using the external designation but there is a utility to convert TypeScript definition files into Kotlin definitions so it was simple enough to get a create.js definition. Using create.js with Kotlin always felt like a kludge and its JavaScript nature made working with it awkward for many activities such as tweening.

The biggest downside to using Kotlin and Create.js together is that both are large libraries making the loading time a bit larger than I would like. For a larger project this would be okay, but startup time for Fleet seemed to be way too long.

What Went Right

The AI that I created for the original version of this game was surprisingly good and yet was fairly simple to implement once the base ideas behind it were worked out.  The version of the AI in this game is essentially the same as the original version except that it was cleaned up. It didn't take too long to port the code over and it just work. If all the code I ported went this smoothly, I would have ported many more games by now.

Summary

I think this version of Fleet is a bit nicer than the original though there is still a lot of things that I would have loved to do had I the time. It is possible that I may revisit this game in the future with a deluxe version of the game, but that will not be for a while.

As for using Kotlin for future HTML games, I am still up in the air. If I could find a good cross-platform library with similar functionality to Create.js, then this would possibly be a good thing. Writing my own cross platform library is not likely in the near term, but after I get my Masters it may be something I would think about. I am still wanting to try out the Rust language, so how much I like that language will determine which of the two languages I will be focusing on in the future.