My latest project – ALES, an HTML5 platformer/editor

by Darius Kazemi on December 17, 2010

in ALES,html5,projects

ALES Screenshot

I haven’t been posting here recently because I’ve been working hard on a side project with Darren Torpey: ALES, an HTML5 level editor & sharer.

If you’re running Firefox or Chrome (and probably Safari/Opera) you can try out the editor, or give some sample levelsshot.

Some tips:

  • The block types include: two solid ground tiles, one push block (in black), one exploding block marked with (!), one block that disappears in a few seconds when it is stood on (the clay-looking one).
  • The blue enemy is like a standard goomba. Enemies can trigger the disappearing block.
  • The red enemy explodes after a few moments when you stomp it, taking out all the surrounding tiles.
  • The (!) block will explode when something explodes next to it — you can chain lots of those blocks to get interesting effects. You can start a chain with a red enemy.
  • Pushblocks can kill enemies and trigger disappearing blocks.
  • Adding star tiles to your map will add a win state when the player collects all the stars.

If you find any bugs, please either comment here or report them on our Issues page. And if you have general feedback, I’d love to hear it. This project is in continual development.

{ 5 comments }

Andrex December 18, 2010 at 1:27 am

This is really, really cool. I take it support for custom tilesets is coming?

And what’s the process for loading levels made with this into an actual game? Is it just an array like the Leave Me Alone demo?

Darius Kazemi December 27, 2010 at 1:36 pm

Whoops, this comment got lost in the moderation queue.

Yep, custom tileset support is coming. You can also save your level out to a JSON file (really just the array in a simple file format) and then load it back in by dragging the file into the designated drag/drop zone in the upper right.

Andrex December 27, 2010 at 1:55 pm

Great to hear. This will definitely push Akihabara (and possibly anything else that supports ALES’s output) into another realm.

Cybor April 25, 2011 at 2:21 pm

Great editor for prototyping, would be nice to have a simple version that work offline with import/export to akihabra.
Could get it to run on FF but latest Chrome doesn’t work, very slow and tile outline is drawn not erased on each ’tile move’, think the program goes into continious loop when I enable the developer tool in Chrome..

Darius Kazemi April 25, 2011 at 2:41 pm

Yeah, it crashes out in Chrome these days. When I get some time I’ll look into it… glad you like it, though!

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