Emily Daniels

Over this past weekend my friend Darren Torpey and I ran the second in a series of game jams at the Sprout/DINO space in Somerville, MA. I had recently heard about Kesiev who created an open HTML5 game engine called Akihabara and wanted to try it out since we only had 23 hours to create a game start to finish. I chose to do a first person shooter game with Björk as the main character, coming home to Iceland to defeat Cthulhu, who had taken up residence there. Link!

I chose to create my sprites in pixel art style, and let me tell you it is an under-appreciated art style; pixelating Björk consisted of me defining and implementing a color strategy that took about half an hour for the small span of 12 x 12 pixels! Maybe I was too much a perfectionist about it, but I don’t think so.

Here you can see Björk in her normal and death states. I gleaned a lot of inspiration from her Homogenic album, which I thought captured her at her most iconic. After that I asked the other game-makers at the jam what came to mind when they thought of Iceland. Having recently been in the news for the massive volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, we were able to come up with a slew of stereotypical Iceland things.

Vikings, hot springs and a bankrupted coin sprite were made. Next I set about defining the minions of the hideous world-crushing creature from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”.

As well as the Big Boss Cthulhu of the final fight scene.

Note that in their death states, the people turn into angry-eyed zombies and the creatures turn into peaceful-eyed angels. I am not sure why. The Akihabara game engine consists of a main HTML doc of less than 1,000 lines of code that calls 7 relatively small Javascript files and 9 PNG images. My image files ended up being 737kb, and the code files were 151kb, so the entire game was under 1MB! I could fit it on a floppy disk if I so chose! All this able to be run inside any browser capable of supporting HTML5. Really really cool.

After swapping in the sprite sheet and backgrounds I created some witty banter between Björk and Cthulhu, using actual quotes from Björk and her songs. Björk says “I am a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.” and Cthulhu says:

And it continues. Cthulhu sics his minions on Björk, she blasts them with fire pellets, and the battles take place over the landscape of Iceland.

Land of both fire…and…ice.

After Björk makes mincemeat out of these gremlin minions and evil vikings, she parlays with the Big Boss.

Her response to this is “All is full of love.” Well said Björk! Now, while I was working with this code I noticed that you could win the game if you just stayed in the position where you were from the beginning and mashed the z button really hard for the whole game. If you aren’t distracted by the Power Up bankrupt coins falling from the sky, you can get through the minions and have 3 Björk lives killed by the Big Boss and still defeat him in the end.

I have to give huge kudos to Kesiev- I’m not a traditional programmer and I know only bits and pieces of HTML and Javascript, but I was able to figure out what I needed to comment out from his code and what I needed to change in order for the game to be up and running pretty quickly. The only thing that’s missing is the audio, but that should be easy to implement in later releases of the code.

Start to finish this game took me 12 hours to make. The thing that has been most trying is working within WordPress to host the game files in order to display correctly. That is the nice thing about making something like this in HTML5- being able to open it in any browser and play. I haven’t figured this out yet, so I’ve embedded a video of the game from start to finish (it’s 3 minutes long) with me filling in some sound effects and dialogue.

UPDATE: Thanks to my friend Eric Ferraiuolo the game is now playable for all! Can YOU help Bjork defeat Cthulhu? (The “A” Button is the “Z” Button and move with the arrow keys.)  Link!