As I write this, the Moon is emerging from the shadow of the Earth. Tonight is the Total Eclipse of a Supermoon – a somewhat rare combination. Earlier this evening, my family went out to look at the moon for a while. Of course in Pittsburgh, any astronomical curiosity is met with cloudy weather, and tonight was typical.

We sat around on a damp park bench in cool evening breezes for more than an hour, and caught only a few glimpses of the moon through gaps in the clouds.

Frustrating, but in the end we did see the moon go from full to half to a small waning crescent.

The Moon is rapidly waxing again now, ultimately visiting all the Phases of the Moon in one busy evening. But the sky here is now a uniform blue-gray blanket, and also rain is falling from it. Oh well; techincally we saw the eclipse, and I even coaxed my camera into focusing on the moon a few times…or nearly focusing. (Ever try taking pictures of the Moon? It’s possible, but it’s not easy.)

And now to bed. “Goodnight room; goodnight Moon; goodnight Shadow passing over the Moon….”

After writing a one-button train game in 1024 bytes of JavaScript for JS1k 2015, I was itching to do some more game development utilizing JavaScript and the HTML5 canvas.

(These days, JavaScript+HTML5 is a surprisingly powerful combination for game development, at least in terms of prototyping concepts. I’m sure it has limits in production, but being able to mess with just a few text files and reload with no compile cycle is quite refreshing after programming in your favorite language that isn’t like that.)

Then I happened to check the Ludum Dare site. Sure enough, Mini Ludum Dare #58 had just begun, and the theme was PONG.

Perfect! I wanted to experiment with some techniques that are perfectly suited to a PONG variant. A real Ludum Dare Compo is a grueling weekend, but a Mini burns longer and cooler…they’re for practice, basically.

So yeah, I’m in. Let’s have some PONG!

I cooked up a preliminary beta version: just a screensaver with no user input, but it illustrates the look of the game I hope to cook up over the next few days. Enjoy!

Back in December, I made a half-hearted attempt to create a game for the Ludum Dare 31 competition. I hadn’t been planning to do a Ludum Dare, which is a huge time commitment when done properly. I just noticed it was going on when I felt like writing some code, so I took a casual stab at it. I made some progress on a pure JavaScript game engine, and defined an interesting look for a game, but I didn’t really have time to make it a playable game.

I do like what I came up with, and I’ve continued to work on it in my spare time. I’ll post about it again eventually.