Saturday, July 31, 2010

10K Apart competition

In the early '90, when I had my first contact with computers, I don't even heard about Cd-roms, or other freaky inventions like hard discs. I had 2 floppy stations, 3.5' and 5.25', with that 'bigger' (by size, no capacity) all the time busy with DOS disk, so everything I had was only 1.44MB. My favorite games then were Prince of Persia (yes, that one from top of this blog) and King's Quest (I finish it first time in my life after almost 18 years of playing, couple months ago on Sarien, online canvas versions of Sierra games).
Today I felt a gust of those days. 'An Event Apart' organized crazy web-app competition called 10K Apart with two main rules: total file size, including images, scripts and markup, must be under 10K and app must work in IE9, Firefox and WebKit browsers.
After about 8 hours of developing two games and bugfixing one annoying webportal simultaneously, let me introduce Stairs to heaven in 6,22KB.

Enjoy and don't forget to click '5 stars' on 10kA site:).

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Adapting to newer devices

After PRE, the next device introduced by PALM was called PIXI. It's one big mystery why newer, more complex and forward-looking device has smaller screen size than its predecessor. Nowadays, when mobiles has all the time more and more additional goodies, it's at least not really clever. But if we want to get to the widest audience our apps need to be flexible. Because I was anxious at the time, I chose the simplest way to run my Zombie Eliminator also on Pixi - I just make 80px height 'dead zone' on the bottom. It is visible on PRE and hidden on PIXI. Simple & working.
I recommend also nice art about Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes by Bryan Rieger at Mobi forge.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

First touch with Palm Pre

My 'Zombie Eliminator' is now ready to download for your PalmPre phone in official Palm App Catalog. Twelve levels of pure fun served in sixteen languages. Check it:

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The "A Game By Its Cover" Competition

On the end of June the new "A Game By Its Cover" Competition started on the TIGSource.
"A Game By Its Cover" is a game development competition based on how people's work inspires others to think in new and wonderful ways. In it we'll make real games out of fake game carts whose creators probably never imagined would become something real!

Because I like the idea, and I was looking for some simple project to test first options of my Javascript canvas-based game engine, you can watch progress of my "Real-time tree growing simulation" in this threat on TIGForums.