Jonathan Bossenger

It started out as a silly little idea I had one day, it’s now a fully-fledged game block!

It even has a dedicated game page, which you can visit by clicking the link below.

Dodge – an interactive WordPress game

You can take a look at the code in the GitHub repository.

Read the original story behind this block below…

Ok, so bare with me on this one.

Just over three years ago, I was a guest on the Crossword podcast, talking about the WP Notifications project. I can’t remember if it was before or during the podcast recording, but Luke, Jonathan, and I discussed whether using WordPress as a game development platform would be possible.

At the time I thought that this was probably perfectly possible. The WordPress front end is the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as other browser-based games, so why not?

Fast forward to this week, and I recently presented an online workshop on the new Interactivity API that’s coming to WordPress 6.5.

I’ve also been dabbling a bit in game development using Godot, an open-source game engine. One of the first game tutorials in the Godot docs is a simple game called Dodge the Creeps, in which your player character has to move around the screen dodging, well, creeps.

And this got me thinking, could I recreate Dodge the Creeps using the Interactivity API in a WordPress block?

Well, after a bit of tinkering last night and this morning, I’ve managed to successfully build the first part of the game, a player icon that can move around the screen.

There is still a lot of work to be done to turn this into a working game, but I’m excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned, because I can see this turning into a bit of a series of posts…