Forums » Help » Arkanoid clone

Hi Guys,

I have been given a programming test as my final job interview for a big software house. I am supposed to create an ARAKNOID clone (with a bit of xml config file importing), using a JS / HTML5 framework of my choice (they use impact). I have a little bit of JS knowledge but am primarily an Objective-C / Java dev. I have a week to do it.

Any thoughts? Is impact the best / easiest framework for a JS / HTML5v n00b? Anyone done anything similar with impact and would be willing to give me some pointers? There are loads of JS arkanoid games out there. Are these easy to port across to impact to use as a starting point?

Thanks for your patience...

I almost recommended JSGF but I thought to myself that would be just plain mean.

No, by far impactjs is the best as far as I'm concerned. It's easy once you get the hang of it. Problem is, one week is not a lot of time to get the hang of almost anything, so you better get cracking.

Jesse Freeman's book (HTML5 game dev with impact) on the subject will help you get started in less than a day. That's one good resource to start with.

Also... there is another...

Thanks alexandre, I assume the other resource you mean is impact itself?

theres half an arkanoid clone in the tutorials, thats why they gave you the task ....you can do it!

Interested in whether Skwiddy got the job or not? ;-)

EDIT: Just realised the timestamp on the original post! Derp. Maybe this will still help someone. Hope he got the job!

Quote from Skwiddy
Hi Guys,

I have been given a programming test as my final job interview for a big software house. I am supposed to create an ARAKNOID clone (with a bit of xml config file importing), using a JS / HTML5 framework of my choice (they use impact). I have a little bit of JS knowledge but am primarily an Objective-C / Java dev. I have a week to do it.

Any thoughts? Is impact the best / easiest framework for a JS / HTML5v n00b? Anyone done anything similar with impact and would be willing to give me some pointers? There are loads of JS arkanoid games out there. Are these easy to port across to impact to use as a starting point?

Thanks for your patience...

I'm a PHP developer and so getting into more non-jQuery JS with impact has been great to learn.

Some of the things that stumped me at first were:

1. The Object Inheritance model in JS, its fairly unique. Read: http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/ that is what Impact uses. Might help you understand the flow of object creation, etc.

2. The Docs here are pretty good. You already code so the Source + The Docs on this site will get you pretty far.

3. Jesse Freeman's book is good but its written for a platformer. A lot can be translated but you don't have much time. Either way its worth it if you plan on sticking with the framework. I found that as a someone who already knows programming a lot of the book I could have figured out in the source or here on the forums. But people that are new to Impact and programming in general stand a lot to gain from it.

4. Conditional testing & type coercion have lost me a couple hours. You use stricter languages so you may not have this issue. It works differently than PHP ( what I am used to ) so I have made some stupid mistakes that got buried.

5. A lot of the people on this forum, are also on http://indie-resource.com and it is much more active. Not ImpactJS specific but you might just get the help you need.

yea ive been wondering if he got it to ...

Sorry for the delay guys. Yes I got the job! Thanks for all the help on this forum, keep up the good work.