A turn-based 4X strategy game I built from scratch — custom WebGPU engine, eight civilisations, no install. Play it in your browser right now.
Been a bit of a spotty work for progress on fun projects due to being crazy busy at work. I crawled into this weekend.
However some progress has been made. First up I worked on getting saving and loading games in place - pretty simple, just serialize out the relavant bits of game state to JSON and pop them in local storage. Loading a game, reverse that.
The other thing I wanted to get in place was a loading screen somewhat similar to that in the original game. There were three reasons I wanted to do this:
- Its just kind of iconic and cool.
- There aren’t loads of hefty assets in the game but it still takes a few seconds to load on my rubbish rural broadband connection and I wanted to hide that (I could do some work to make the resource loading more efficient… maybe one day).
- You can’t play audio until the user has interacted with the web page and I really wanted to get the BBC boot up sound in as the game starts… so I needed something to catch a click.
Fortunately the maths behind the original loading screen have been documented by Mark Moxon so it was pretty trivial to implement. He’s done all the hard work - thank you!
You can see all this in the video below.
Forty-two years after I first started programming, I built a browser-native 4X from scratch — a custom WebGPU engine, eight civilisations, and an AI opponent I'm still teaching to play. No install, no sign-up. Play it right now.