Ajax Girl

Mathieu Henri saw Scott Schiller’s generated favicons VU meter and wanted to “push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.”

Wow. He went and did it. The entire game runs in the favicon!

DEFENDER of the favicon was done in 3 nights, from start to finish. Each frame of the game is generated on the fly in JavaScript into a 16×16 canvas element, then converted to a 32bits PNG image and used in place of the favicon. The core of the game act as a state machine. Notice a few details such as the pause when this window is not focused, and the resuming and game over transitions.

Obviously since this little game makes use of canvas and the toDataURL method, it does not work in Internet Explorer, and Safari does not seem to support PNG favicons. Prefer Opera or FireFox, although FireFox 3 suffers from garbage collection hick ups when playing in the favicon.

The game logic isn’t really complex but remains true to the original Defender and provides enough action for 16×16 pixels. The original game mechanics would make Defender of the favicon insanely difficult. Therefore a few adjustments were done : none of the enemies fire at you, your Defender got upgraded with a shield, and finally the Landers do not mutate into unstoppable war machines after abducting a humanoid but wander in your general direction.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/338037753/defender-of-the-favicon