Over the weekend I enlisted the help of my old pal Zach Lysobey to give me some tips on adding Ajax functionality to Nano. Zach and I have been working together as a web design and development duo for years now as Rough Giraffed. He’s no stranger to javascript, AJAX and programming in general so he was able to hook me up with the basics real quick.
Ajax is a technology that does lots of stuff for websites/applications, but for Nano the primary benefit is avoiding full page refreshing. This is another step into making Nano feel less like a browser game and more like a standard video game. Avoiding the flicker of a full page refresh will hopefully make the player feel like they haven’t left the game world to enter an Inventory screen. Instead the Inventory screen opens right there, as an overlay to the standard World screen.
The screenshot above can’t show the Ajax functionality in action, that’ll have to wait for the video demo. But what you do see is how the current, basic Inventory screen looks. On the left is the character’s inventory with a list of Cards, and Items gathered from the world or winning events. You see a bunch of Kick cards because, while testing, I had my ol’ Test Dummy only dropping Kick.
On the right is the character’s Deck list. These are cards that the player can use while in combat. Currently, there are only about 15 cards in the deck, but later there will be a minimum deck size that will, most likely, be greater than 15.But, I’ll get more into Deck editing, and Items in another post.
For now, just know that there will be a lot of this kind of effort put into making this browser game not feel like a traditional frame-based browser game.