The Spirit Engine 2 Released!

If you are a fan of indie RPG's that have a bit more to offer than amateurish graphics and repetitive gameplay, then you'll really enjoy this game. 5 years in the making, this sequel to The Spirit Engine features enhanced gameplay and storylines. You owe it to yourself to go check out the demo.

Offline storage and jquery...

I've decided to start writing plugings for jQuery - if anything to learn how to write more reusable code and gain fame and fortune ... heh.

There appears to be a big, gaping, mawing, yawning hole in jQuery's suite of tools and plugins - as you can see from this link. There's no offline storage support.

So, that's my challenge for the weekend on top of everything else I'm doing. I'm going to start an offline storage plugin for jquery. I'll link to it from this post when I get it working.

If there is someone already working on this, please let me know and I'll try to find another gap in jQuery's world.

YUI and jQuery... becomming torn

First off, I don't want to start a debate about whether or not YUI is "better" than jQuery. I've been using YUI for years and I've been a die hard proponent of it since before it was even available publicly. YUI has saved my life so many times in development land that it's not even funny. However after I left Yahoo several months ago I was introduced to jQuery at my new company. I feel that I am somewhat uniquely able to form an opinion about jQuery vs YUI in a real world environment. My experience has been that of an SUV vs a motor cycle. While YUI - the SUV can get you just about anywhere with ease, you carry alot along with you. Whereas jQuery seems more akin to a motorcycle. You can go anywhere the SUV can, and even more places, in a more lightweight fashion. If you are familiar with traffic jams - which type of vehicle seems to get where it needs to go even when the traffic is at a standstill? That's right, motorcycles. However which vehicle would you rather be in during a crash? Probably an SUV.

What does this mean? Well if you like using a library that is somewhat of a kitchen sink and will do it all for you - and has excellent support, then use YUI. If you are somewhat of a do-it-yourself-er and just want to get from point a to point b as quickly as possible, then use jQuery. For me, I've been really digging jQuery right now, and not missing at all the whole YAHOO.util.foo.bar.baz.bat.bum stuff, and instead finally "getting" jQuery where you just gather up all the nodes you want to do stuff to, do stuff to em, then move on.


Here's to hoping some future iteration of YUI can get some of that jQuery mojo - then we can have the best of both worlds...

An MSX Emulator in Javascript and Canvas

Canvas implementations make me feel all warm inside. This is an emulation of the MSX using just javascript and Canvas. Amazing!

Unity3D Powers New Mass Media MMO

I TOLD you Unity3D is going to be big. Really big. This article talks about how Cartoon Network's MMO is going to use Unity technology in their web mmo. I wonder if Unity might become the spiritual successor to Director on the web?

The Future of the Internet is Fabbing: Shapeways

Fabbing is basically allowing anyone to create 3d objects. I firmly believe this will be as big or bigger than the inventing of the printing press. This is the inventing of the "anything press".

While I cannot get into the site yet (pleeeeeze beta me!) I can totally see this as becomming a part of the fabbing movement.

What should really happen now is Shapeways should team up with Ponoko....

Unity3D - the Killer App Tool for 2009

Think about it. An application that makes it easy to create games for everything from a PC to a Mac to an iPhone to a Wii. And uses Javascript - one of the most used programming languages on the planet - as it's scripting engine.

The interface is awesome, the engine is fast and flexible, and if you are an indie game developer it's very affordable.

I would venture to say that 2008 may be a good year for Unity, but I think more likely the "inflection point" will hit some time in early 2009 and you'll see some really amazing things from folks that build with this.

If you are frustrated with Adobe with its Flash and Director stuffage - give Unity3D a try and see for yourself.

I'm seriously tempted to buy a copy if only to enhance my skills as a javascript developer.

Alien Terminator on Game Giveaway of the Day

Since Giveawayoftheday doesnt release a new game every day, its something of an event when a new game comes up. This weekend's game is called Alien Terminator. While it seems like you might think it's something like H.R. Giger meet's Ahnald, it's really about piloting a space truck with a really big gun across a martian landscape killing suprisingly human-shaped enemies. I can't say it's the greatest game I've ever played, but the graphics are decent and the run and gun style gameplay makes it seem more like a kinda wave based shmup. And it most certainly is worth the price of admission.

If you are leery about Giveawayoftheday.com let me just say that I've been downloading games from them for at least a year if not longer, and there's never been a hint of spyware or viruses from them. Check em out!

Defender of the favicon

I'm so very jealous. Here is another masterpiece of javascript development:

DEFENDER of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis' brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu 'p01' Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller's experiment with generated favicons VU meter. The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.

Who's going to create the first favicon RPG?

Grumble grumble.

These folks whip this stuff out in 3 days and I am still working on getting time to port an antiquated JS game library to modern times.

Grumble grumble.

find your strength

I'm not really sure what this site is about yet, but it looks intriguing.

Hide and Seek Festival - this looks fun!

This is a very interesting blog. Sometimes I stumble across something too cool to keep to myself. This person talks about a "Hide and Seek Festival" - which at first sounds kinda childish, until you read about some of the social realtime games they had come up with and played. Makes me want to start something like that here.

I gotta get back into blog posting. Twitter has poisoned my ability to post - when you can fire off little snippets any time, why blog?

QR Codes from Google Charts!

This is really an amazing development. It's something that seems like a "sleeper" feature that could really take off. You can now use Google charts api to create QR codes which could then be used on websites, t-shirts, or anything you can think of. As more phones "read" that code, the usefulness will expand exponentially. Very cool!

Keeping busy

I'm keeping super busy at work. You know, startup and all. I feel bad about not posting too much right now, but you'll see lots of amazing things soon.