Monstery was a game I wrote as a kid between 2011 (when I was a pupil at Rosenlundskolen) and 2014 (when I was a pupil at Atheneskolen). The game is written from scratch in JavaScript utilizing HTML5, a relatively new technology back then. I made all of the game on my own (including the graphics and the game engine), with the only exception being the music which is made by Aaron Krogh who admirably releases music in public domain.
A little backstory about the (rather incremental) development process: the first game I wrote, Cube Defender, was essentially a Space Invaders-type game with cubes moving downwards which the player had to avoid/shoot. This must have been around 2011. I then used the source code as the basis for a new game called Survival Arena, in which the cubes were replaced by pixelated monsters (I had a fascination with pixel art from playing Pokemon Sapphire from age 7 to 9) moving towards the player, and the player was no longer constrainted to horizontal movement. Eventually, I would come to add a background landscape, and over a year of on and off development, it would increasingly take the form of an RPG. Finally, when I thought Survival Arena was no longer a suitable name, I renamed it to Monstery, and the development would halt as I became increasingly interested in systems programming.
This was also my first exposure to trigonometry. I was trying to figure out how to shoot a projectile from the player in constant speed towards the point where a mouse click occured. It seemed to me like a reasonable geometric problem. I tried without luck explaining the problem to my math teacher at the time. Eventually, I would come across a StackOverflow post that explained arctan, and I was able to use that to calculate the angle and from that the velocity. It must be noted, however, that this is a somewhat suboptimal solution to the problem, which could also be solved by dividing the difference vector by its Euclidean norm. Until this point, I had little interest in mathematics, the subject I would eventually come to study at university.
For many years, the game was lost, but with help from my friend Denis Smajlović, I eventually recovered it from a hard disk of an old liquid damaged laptop of mine.
Click here to play the game in your browser.
Loading the game might take a while. Also, it's probably not very portable. If it doesn't work correctly, try to run it in a modern, desktop-based web browser.