I recently began creating an 8-bit style zombie game. I decided to do this in JavaScript with the canvas element as a rendering surface. I must say that I have already learned quite a bit.
Interestingly enough, I’m pretty sure that I could have completed a game like this in half the time using Flash, as a good portion of time was spent on creating a stable animation script. This is something that Flash is inherently built to do. In the end, I created a double-buffered mini-animation engine that really helped in reducing lag and flickering that sometimes occurred when drawing to the browser directly.
It is still pretty rough, with plenty of room for improvement, but it appears to run rather well. I would love to add a built-in capacity to run simple filmstrip animations, as they will be important for various interactions of the player and enemies.
The graphics are intentionally pixellated, and are actually a series of PNG sprites that are copied onto the canvas.
I eventually want to evolve the game quite a bit, and add far more than is shown above. Currently though, each zombie is generated from 5 different sets of body parts and each one lurks towards the player until within biting distance. The beginnings of a level generator adds grass and dirt randomly; I aim to create mini city scenes complete with obstacles to hide behind.
