The Realm of Blog

Native Interactivity and Animation for the Web HTML5 Canvas by Steve Fulton & Jeff Fulton Many of you probably know that I have been complaining and whining constantly about the new web standards  pushed so hard by the w3.org.   I am not a fan of 'applications' in websites that can be disrupted with right clicks and mouse highlights so easily like most of the work I have seen in HTML 5.  Of course there is always evolution that eventually wins me over.  Case example would be Onslaught! Arena , and I love the way they disable 'mouse highlight of elements'. What's that called?  And the disable right click!  How'd dey do dat?  Better yet, how did they even animate anything?   Well now I will finally get a chance to find out officially and learn from the ground up. For a while I have been following two brothers work, after accidentally stumbling into their site looking for (googling) 'Atari 8bit graphics' for inspiration.  What I found...

Graphics were pretty tough in the 8bit Atari days.  It took a lot of work to get things rolling, a lot of plot and drawTo and Player-Missile graphics.  That is until I discovered the method programmers were using to re-define character sets and create graphics using extra characters in the fontset.  The only way to do this effectively was to use a program that reordered the bytes for you, saved out that data and loaded it back in.  One such program that would load and save fonts was called Superfont. This program allowed the user to edit characters of the font in the checker board area and then save out the font to be loaded into a program later. These programs came from BBSs(dial-up online bulletin board systems, pre-internet) and in magazines like I have mentioned previously in my Gamasutra Blog, Compute!. Needless to say, I spent   mountain growing amounts of time making my own fonts and experimenting with fonts and creating my own.  Duri...

Things have been super busy.  Doing my tutorials for the iPhone.  Enjoying it very much, it has taken it's toll on my Flash/ActionScript 3 development.  But I have managed to find time to update my  portfolio site !!! I think I have found that people don't mind visiting my portfolio website when I offer them more activities than when they first visited.  Most of them probably do not constantly look at my prior titles or artwork, however that is a guestimate since I do not have analytics on that.   Holidays are a perfect opportunity for this!  Everyone loves getting a holiday greeting. Lately I have been thinking about creating a public variable to tie the whole sites' activities together.  Basically the player could change that variable in the activities and that variable will be shared throught the game.  I am thinking since I developed such a complex animation system for my character, users could purchase new outfits for him. ...

And the best way to move forward is to learn new things!  Found this a gem of a website called  Codecademy.     Seriously fun and easy way to learn Javascript and it feels like one of those old Atari 8bit games that trick you into Basic programming by making you feel like you are playing a text adventure. I really recommend this to EVERYONE.  Even if you are not really a code person.  You can collect awards, score points and even log in with Facebook.  The company is hiring right now, so if you are good at code and good at explaining it, go check it out!  Who knows I might be doing a tutorial you wrote in the near future!  I sure hope so, it is addicting. I really hope someone rights an Objective C tutorial.  One thing I have learned, JavaScript is very similar in syntax to ActionScript!  :D

The other day I came across a blog by someone in the game industry that was such a distortion of reality it really made me feel sorry for the blog's author.   I was going to write a retort about it, but you know... It's not worth it.  Let this person believe that they are the great driving force in the industry and all of his failings are the faults of others. I have games to make.

Had to put my Hello World up!  Turns out my MacMini comes with OSX Lion which is great because the new version of XCODE (4 vs 3.2) needs that to run.  It is slightly different than the previous version.  Actually a lot different all of these screen shots in my book look totally different than the new redesign of 4.  But everyone says on the forum if you can get passed chapter 2 then you're in. I guess I am in!  Interactivity starts bright and early tomorrow morning!

Like I stated in the previous post... We planned to go to the Apple Store this Thursday to get my MacMini.  Steve Jobs died Wednesday.  What a weird twist of fate.  The first day I purchase an Apple computer, is the first day the creator of Apple is no more.  Named it littleJobs.  Installing Xcode 4 with Mac OS X and iOS SDKs. This little thing is so sharply packaged and designed! Amy, My MacMini and my Alienware which will have to give up the tv monitor. Amy and I had fun at the mall.  Ate Chinese Buffet afterword and bought a nice MacAlly keyboard for 19$ with a phased out AppleMouse. (they were always my favorite)  The installer is so close to being finished... Can't wait to tear through my book of samples.