Little Gem Farmers
Released: July 2013
Available on: Official Site
Little Gem Farmers is a simple, casual game about a princess and her friends trying to find treasure chests. When clicked on, each character upgrades or changes the block he/she is standing on in different ways. Find out who needs to touch which blocks to make treasure chests appear, then claim those chests before someone else in the world does!
Little Gem Farmers was an experiment to see if I could make an HTML5 game without using the canvas element. It was made purely with CSS and jQuery. I also wanted to see what was possible with WebSockets, an HTML5 technology that allows real-time communication between users. So the playing field is shared amongst all users. You'll see blocks change in real time when other players are online.
I got the idea for the game by looking at Daniel Cook's free Planet Cute art asset pack. I really wanted to do something with these graphics, and the various block types in the package screamed, "Farming!" In Version 1.0, however, the characters didn't move on their own. I added that several months later as part of a major overhaul to the game.
Unfortunately, because the game was coded in front-end web languages, it was easily exploitable. In late 2014, someone hacked the global high score list. Teams were based on the players' IP addresses, and some teams had accumulated quite a few points, so it was sad to see that get destroyed. I took the leaderboards down for a while but recently brought them back (as individual usernames now) with some more security measures in place.