The theme of this jam was “Ritual”. I managed to push a really polished and super fun game, that adheres to the theme very loosely. You are a fairy trying to gain more glamour from Twitter, so the players tweet attacks, buffs and healing spells, the game picks them up and throws them at the player, who has to choose between dodging and picking them up.
I made the game programming all by myself using phaser. I’m super duper thankful to @Eamanelf and Fran Lionti who did all the artwork and sound for the game respectively. I would also like to thank @pfque_ and @yiyo_chan for letting me crash on their super comfy couch. A especial mention goes to @stinkfist_vg who came up with all the evil things that attack our fairy.
I’m not gonna do the checklist thing I usually do, because the game turned out fine. What I’m going to do is tell you about how I did the Twitter integration, without too many details because the code is on github.
I used codebird-js with read-only app authentication to fetch all the tweets mentioning @TweetfairyGame. Once I have the tweets, I scan them for the hashtags #tfheal, #tfattack, and #tfbuff, and I add them to the spell_deck. I also store the user who sent the tweet and the tweet itself. Afterwards, I randomly pick one spell type from the spell deck and one random tweet corresponding to that spell type, I launch the spell with all the data.
Another cool thing to mention tech-wise is that if you are using custom fonts, you should check fontdetect out. It will save you several headaches.
The future of Tweetfairy:
- Good mobile support
- Integration with the kongregate api
- Integration with google play services
- Setting up a Twitch plays Tweetfairy
- Figuring out if we need to scale the twitter side of the game, and if we need to deal with the Internet acting like a highschooler that curses too much
You can play Tweetfairy here.