The Exterminator scans for the number 13 hidden within the patterns of your room so you can eliminate them. Like in the Ghostbusters movie. Hurry or they will overload the circuits.
- Controls: click/tap
- Tested on: Android (Chrome/Firefox) in portrait mode.
- 💃 Live
- 🍔 YouTube
- 🍕 Code
- 🍨 Post-mortem
- 🍩 Developer Notes
Note:
- This device uses the camera so make sure it has permission for your browser.
- Make sure the lights are on and that you have camera/video enabled in apps/chrome and chrome/settings.
- After you click Scan, you should get some detections. If not, then move your phone back and forth. When you get some detections, you can click the scope to Capture them. Once captured, you must quickly smash them because they are not happy and will begin to zip around faster and faster until they overload your circuits.
- Tip: If you point it at the ceiling, you will capture less 13s.
- Warning: Consumer protection groups have found that this device doesn't actually work to eliminate the number 13 from your environment. But if it makes you feel better, that is all that matters 🐲
- Competition: js13kgames
- Theme: The 2024 theme is Triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13)
- Goal: Win a t-shirt 🏆🎉
- Day 1: Finished the core game 💥
- Day 2: Added Scope
and... 🎬
After submitting my first entry, in the last few days of the competition I decided to try for one more.
An idea had been itching my brain: NPCs and players can't have phobias. We needed something to use in our environment.
I've always wanted to do something with the camera feed. My first thought was that the player had to make the shape of the number 13 with their body. But that wasn't possible without using a huge library like tensorflow.
So I went with simple edge detection to fake the idea that you where finding and exterminating 13s. The idea still makes me laugh. If you ever see someone at the airport pointing their phone at something and then smashing away, maybe it is my game.
I spent a lot of time on a retro instrument panel. The procedurally generated leather effect alone took hours. And the dials, toggles and sliders a few hours more. But the end result was ugly. Time wasted.
So I went with something plain. But a user said that it looked like a coffee cup so i added cross hairs. Another user said the green blobs should be number 13s so I changed that.
The prompts in the game were Scan and Capture. I didn't like the idea of "Click to Scan". It just seemed unpolished. But it was confusing. Does Scan mean it is scanning or does it mean "Click to Scan"? This nagged at me, and when a tester on Slack complained, I changed it.
I don't like buttons, so I use one click handler bound to window. Then, I keep advancing/reverting the state. But if a user is frantically clicking at the end of a level, the next state could get skipped, so I put in a delay that refuses clicks and an indicator to wait.