HTML5 Canvas, 2nd Edition

A Simple Tile-Based Game

Let’s move from Asteroids to another classic game genre, the tile-based maze-chase game. When you’re discussing early tile-based games, undoubtedly Pac-Man enters the conversation. Pac-Man was one of the first commercially successful tile-based games, although it certainly was not the first of its kind. The maze-chase genre was actually well covered by budding game developers before microcomputers were even thought possible. Many minicomputer and mainframe tile-based games, such as Daleks, were crafted in the ’60s and ’70s. In this section, we create a simple turn-based maze-chase game. Our game, Micro Tank Maze, is based loosely on Daleks, but we use the tank sprites from Chapter 4. Figure 9-10 is a screenshot from the finished game.

Figure 9-10. Micro Tank Maze in action