Diary of a Browsergame: The Codex

Work is well under way on writing up the Design Document for Working Title, version 1.0. And while there have been a lot of neat ideas and a few not-so-neat ideas, I’m happy to say that I think it’s coming along – albeit slowly.

One of the first implementation choices that I’ve made(I haven’t written any code yet!) is to build Working Title using the Object-Oriented paradigm. That means that each of my players, monsters, and items will be an object, and completely self-contained.

One of the nice things about building all of my objects using the Object Oriented approach is that I can use inheritance to take care of some of the dirty work for me. One function that I will be implementing will exist on each object, and be known simply as toHTML() – all it will do is convert the object into some nice HTML output.

That HTML output is important, because it’s what will be getting used for a feature that I think is pretty neat: The Codex.

Working Title will have an area called “The Codex” that contains readable data on each entity within the game(except players). In order to output the HTML to display a specific entity, I’ll just load that entity and then call toHTML() on it to get at what I need to display to the user.

The Codex idea also brings me to a cool tooltip library I discovered a short time ago, called BoxOver. I’m planning on using it within the actual game itself, so that I can have tooltips everywhere with a minimal amount of extra cruft added to my code – at only 12KB uncompressed, the JavaScript file for BoxOver is nice and lean. And I’m sure I’ll compress it more before it actually gets deployed.

That’s just two of the implementation details for Working Title – there are a few more I’ve got up my sleeve that will either show up on this blog, or within the design document – but either way, you’ll get to see them when they show up.

Luke is the primary editor of Building Browsergames, and has written a large portion of the articles that you read here. He generally has no idea what to say when asked to write about himself in the third person.

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 design, diaryofabrowsergame, workingtitle

Michele

Hmm, i will try to put the header tag too and see if it works. Thanks anyway!

Luke

That's really strange - I've built a quick tester page that you can check out here, with the bare minimum I had to use to get a tooltip working - I noticed that it doesn't seem to work if you only set the body attribute - you have to have a header too.

Michele

It works for me too locally, when i put it under a dynamic environment, it doesn' work.

If it put title="body=[text]" in an HTML element, it just shows a yellow tooltip with "body=[text]" written.

It seems it just doesn't override the title attibute.

As i did not have the time do debug the js code, i just downloaded the other one for now.

Luke

I don't quite understand what you mean by it just showing 'normal' tooltips - isn't that what it's supposed to do?

I used the example page that came with BoxOver to get up and running, and it seems to work fine for me - although I haven't gotten around to testing it in a dynamic environment just yet.

If you can tell me a little more about what's not working, I'll do my best to help you out.

Michele

Unfortunately I tried BoxOver, but I cannot make it work, it just show normal tooltips...

Another library (i am using) for tooltips is Walterzorn.

blog comments powered by Disqus

About

Building Browsergames is a blog about browsergames(also known as PBBG's). It's geared towards the beginner to intermediate developer who has an interest in building their own browsergame.

Your Ad Here