NovaShell Game Creation System - alpha builds available for mac/pc/linux

From the creator of Dink Smallwood comes a great new RPG and adventure game engine called NovaShell. Basically it's a cross platform game engine which uses LUA scripting and is designed to be not only "moddable" but those mods themselves will be "moddable". If this doesnt make sense - just try out the very early alpha builds and see for yourself. Don't expect something polished and ready for prime time however - but the potential for something really on par with GameMaker or MMF is plain to see.

The Age of The Dinosaurs

From Andrew Chen comes a reference to a series of slides by Ralph Koster about problems that face "hit driven" media. Great read for game developers...

SMKF update...

Another UI update. Getting the interface closer to reality. You can click on start - next - done - then try "attack with sword" to see things happen.

Hopefully very soon I'll be able to wrap this into the yahoo im plugin space so you can actually "play " it.

Sword Magic KungFu update

Spent a few minutes on SMKF today. I got a few changes done -- redid some of the UI as well as laid the groundwork for the 'gameloop'.

one step closer...

Applying Game Mechanics to Web Applications - Amy Jo Kim

This is a great set of slides that talks about applying game mechanics to traditional web applications.

Casual Games Go Upscale - CNN

Great article about how casual games are going more mainstream, bigger budget, and higher production values. Has some previews of upcoming games as well.

Tips on using "new" in Javascript

Douglas Crockford has another great article for javascript coders. It talks about when and when not to use the "new" moniker in javascript.

DarkSide Adventures is out

From the creator of "a game with a kitty" comes a new indie game. It has a great pedigree, so go download it and try it out!

Sword Magic KungFu update

Another update to Sword Magic Kung Fu today -- note this is still a test demo. I have added attack animations to let you know who did what. The text is actually wired up to the attack you do so it's more than just animating some text.

Hopefully I'll be close enough to actually start letting folks play a real game soon!

Douglas Crockford proposes new "module" tag for mashups

This is an interesting proposal from Douglas Crockford to allow modules to communicate with one another while not having to share execution space.

HIdden coolness in new YUI Libraries

Inside the new release of the YUI Libraries is a cool new feature. What's funny is that of the few people who visit my blog, out of those there will be even fewer who know or care about the YUI Library stuff, and of those probably only one or two of you who will dig around the code and discover what I'm talking about. That's ok - it's cool. I think it's probably the most interesting part of this release, and I imagine you'll be learning more about it in subsequent releases.

Those of you still here. Still reading. Still - caring.

Heh.

Yahoo Utilities updated!

The Yahoo YUI Utilities have been updated with new features like tabs, onContentReady, and the new Element object. Stay tuned for more info as I find it. Go download it and try it out!

Yahoo! Gallery - mashup goodness

It is suprising that not more folks talk about this site - but I imagine that it's because when it first came out there wasn't much to see and do. Now, however, folks are posting new mashups, plugins, widgets, and other great things on a daily basis. Definitly worth checking out if you dig Yahoo apis.

The Big Idea

Generally, it's not that great of an idea to talk at length about your own projects. Why? Because that's usually all that 80% of the folks who try to create games and things do. They spend hours chatting about how this game will have that feature, or be somehow different from all the other games. They completely overlook the fact that building stuff is hard. Building something someone else would actually want to use is even harder. And on top of that building something that captures the imagination and sucks people in is hardest of all. You can't go to the 7-11 and buy a community for your games/ideas. You have to slowly build that up via establishing trust with your users.

So, for me to go into great length about one of my personal projects is kinda hard to do. On one hand I'd love to sit here and chat about all the ideas and features I want to put into this. One the other I'd rather show - not tell.

So instead I'll just give you the 30 second version. I'm working on a way to combine the ease of creating an RPG of something like RPGMaker with the distribution network of something like Youtube or Flickr. I love to play RPG's and I dont believe that there are nearly enough of them out there :) So, I want to allow someone who doesnt want to invest a lot of time downloading software and figuring out complex languages to create a fun little RPG. I also have other plans but it's not worth talking about them until I can get this idea off the ground. Will it become more than just vaporware on a blog post? I dont know - but I know I'm going to try.

Sword Magic KungFu update 11/11/06

I worked a bit tonight on the UI for smkf. I added status "bars" which show how each attack can be powered up. If you make enough attacks of a certain kind you can do a "super attack" which will be extremely powerful if it prevails. However you open yourself up to vulnerability if you just keep doing one kind of attack...

Javascript Particle Engine

Practical? No. Fun to play with? Yes!

Firefox 2.0 Persistent Storage - speed up your Web 2.0 Apps!

I spent some time and created a proof-of-concept page that demonstrates how much faster sites could be if they started supporting the client-side persistent cache from Firefox 2.0. Basically the first time the page loads it checks to see if this element is already stored - if not it fetches it from the net. After the page has finished loading it then goes and stores that javascript code (imagine some big DHTML library of stuff) into the client-side storage. Then, when the page is reloaded sometime in the future, that data is pulled from the storage instead of from the cache or fetched off the network.

In my testing with big scripts it could take up to 300 msec to load some js. However getting the same code from client-side cache would take anywhere from 0 - 10 msec! That's huge!

Give it a try and consider adding optimizations for client side storage to your bloated js intensive web app :)

NOTE: You need to also have Firebug installed to see the console timing for yourself. Otherwise you'll see JS errors.

W3C Spec for Widgets

With all the varying widget engines popping up every day one hopes that eventually there will be a more universal specification so you can write a widget one time and have it work across many implementations. Let's hope that browser and ria developers adopt this standard - or "any" standard so we can spend less time learning new languages and more time building cool widgets.

Sword Magic KungFu update

Another minor update - though major for me. I lost the changes I made to the laszlo code since I didnt check them in.. argh. So I had to rebuild the arena screen. However I also got a few things working like player damage and score. You can click:

Start - choose a character and hit Done.
click sword or magic or kungfu to see your opponent get damaged.
press the "c" key to see your opponent thwak you...

Not much, but every step forward is a bit closer to done!

More Label fun

Here's some more fun things you can to with HTML LABELs and accesskeys.

Fun!

The Date/Time

For Windows hit ALT+SHIFT+F (MAC: CMD+SHIFT+F) to give focus to that checkbox, then hit spacebar to "click" it. To see the current date and time hit ALT+SHIFT+T . Cool eh?

AOL Boxely's back..for now(?)

Well! For a while AOL's boxely rich media toolkit had been taken offline - just in time for missing the widgets live conference... However it looks like it's back online again, which is good news because the rendering engine is quite nifty. I encourage you to go download it before they decide to take it offline again :)

Web AIM is launched!

From slayeroffice comes news that the web api for AOL IM is now live. Go forth and create cool mashups!

From my perspective, I see this as an excellent platform to build simple multiplayer games. I am going to adapt my Sword Magic Kung-Fu game to use this in addition to Yahoo IM. I can't wait to see what folks build on this.

For goodness sake! Learn to use the LABEL tag!

One of my biggest pet peeves in the world of the web is coming across a form - usually a sign in form for some web 2.0 company - which doesn't understand the basic HTML LABEL tag. This is an extremely convenient and powerful tag! What it allows you to do is assign a label for a form control such as a checkbox or radio button. If you click on the label it is the same as clicking on the form control! This makes checking that "I accept terms and conditions" checkbox that much easier.

So, my challenge to you is this: go to websites which dont seem to understand how the LABEL tag works and drop them a friendly email with the link above and mention that they should update their HTML...

Ok?
YES
NO

Two great Casual RPGs: "FastCrawl" and "Empires and Dungeons"

Recently two great casual RPG's have come across my screen:

FastCrawl by Pawley Games and
Empires and Dungeons by Niels Bauer games. Empires and dungeons takes you on a more strategic quest to build up your castle and train your hero. FastCrawl is all about getting to the monster killing in randomly generated dungeons.

If you enjoy games like Fate from Wildtangent then these two games are the perfect 30 min snack for a lunchtime break.

Macrodobe and Mozilla - two great tastes that taste great together

Macrodobe and Mozilla.org have joined forces to create an Ecmascript virtual machine called Tamarin.

From the site:
The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. The Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript(tm) Virtual Machine within Adobe® Flash® Player.

moo.fx 2.0 is out

If you are into small, fast, cool javascript libraries, then you may dig this new release from moo.fx. I tend to avoid prototype.js based libraries just because I don't dig messing with the Object object - but you may have no such qualms. Give it a try.

enDICEr - my new Yahoo Instant Messenger plugin is live!

Ok, sure it's not world changing - but it is a cool way to generate dice rolls and things when you are playing rpgs and stuff. It also does things like rock-paper-scissors so you can work out where to go for lunch with your pals. It's the first of my experiments with YIM - which SMKF will be the next :)

Wanted: Hypercard for Flash!

Ok folks, get off your web 2.0 duffs and create something really useful and revolutionary. I'm sick of all these social sites and boring spreadsheet apps. Someone with some flash savvy sit down and create a very simple "app" builder like Hypercard and allow it to be embeddable via js in sites like MySpace. You want to change the world? Join an extremely simple IDE with the most ubiquitous presentation method (outside of html).

I've seen some sites that try to build "slideshows" but come on this cant be that difficult...

Sword Magic Kung Fu - update 11/03/2006

Another minor update - or major - depending on your perspective :)
I now have the bare beginnging of the actual playing field. You can hit "start", choose a character, and then see that character show up in the playing field. You can even "shake" your otherwise moribund opponent if you hit any of the attacks...

DailyLit - bite sized books

For folks who only have a few minutes a day to even grab a bit to eat, let alone read a book, this will be an awesome site. All you have to do is choose a book, choose how often you want them to email you the next snippet of a story, and off you go! You can even choose to "fast forward" and read several blocks at a time when you have free time. Very nice! I only wish they supported more books - like all of the Gutenberg project...

Collada - open source data exchange format

From the site:

Jon Peddie gives us an interesting perspective on the games industry and the efforts being made to make asset exchange as easy as possible

Minor Sword Magic KungFu update

Just a minor update - you can now hit "start" and choose your character from a small list (right now) of possible characters. Hopefully this week will have me getting to the actual "fight" screen.

New event in Firefox 1.5 "pageShow"

In case you hadn't found this out already, onload doesnt fire in Firefox when you come back from history. This can seriously mess up your javascript - although the page state is supposedly preserved. So what do you do if you want to execute some code whenever the user comes back to your site from history? Well there are new events called pageShow and pageHide. Check out the docs. I wish I had known this myself earlier :)

Widgipedia: a new resource for widgets and widget builders

Brimming with Web 2.0 rounded corners, light boxes, tag maps and all kinds of widgets, this site seeks to compete with the likes of widgetbox to create a community of widget builders. Widgets are an up and coming thing - and as soon as someone comes up with an easy way to monetize them we'll see them really take off.

Anyway, if you like your websites steeped in drop shadowed rounded corners give this site a try.