Hey Tigs! 

I finally finished my first for-sale game. It's called...

If stabbing your friends while skating around an arena sounds fun, maybe you should buy it. With lovely music by Alec Holowka, shockingly realistic guttural death sounds by Cassie Chui and Evan Balster you can't go wrong!

Check it out and buy it for a dollar if you like it 


Oh, and you'll also get a bonus wallpaper by Sara Gross!

PEGJam shirts are always so damn good.

I like how I got demoted from "Rad People" to "People from Toronto" 

We're bringing droqen and d20love too, yeah. I'm driving. 22 hours go 

So excited to see err'budy and have many hugs and influence the local population into ordering poutine that doesn't exist

New place but still the old furniture I see. Haha. Awesome

The only thing Chrome suffers in is Audio.

If you're targeting Chrome you can use the Web Audio API.

Hey, this is super cool, thanks!

Flash still destroys HTML5 in terms of toolchain and speed of development.

Depends on what you want to do. Every tried impact.js? We use it and it is awesome for our purpose and imho it's way more fun to work with JS + HTML5 than Flash.

Impact.JS does seem to be a nice solution, but I'll never really know, 'cause it costs $99 and the whole point of HTML5 for me right now is free/open web standards.

That said I've seen it used for many games and it does a decent job.

I'm writing my own JS toolkit though and I think I may release it someday soonish.

Chrome is where it's at for HTML5 for now. Not worth considering any others for the moment.

But with that said, it's completely possible to make good games in Chrome/HTML5, and Chrome seems to have taken the lead for most popular browser today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3033566/chrome-most-popular-browser-weekly-may-2012


The only thing Chrome suffers in is Audio. Otherwise performance is quite comparable to Flash at this point. This is a major change from where things were at half a year ago, so if you dismissed it in the early days, time to go back and take another look. Write your own benchmarks if you don't believe it, you will be surprised.


Flash still destroys HTML5 in terms of toolchain and speed of development.

nikki, well, we'll have to agree to disagree then:

1) They are both ECMAScript derived
2) AS3 still supports the prototype object
3) 'this' keyword exists in both languages and means very much the same thing
4) anonymous functions exist in both languages and have very much the same usages (and yes I use them in both)
5) AS3 can be loosely typed if you choose, making it nearly identical to JS
6) The syntax for both languages, including array, object and function declaration, is nearly identical
7) event listeners are implemented in extremely similar ways
most of the HTML5 features like LocalStorage and Audio mimic the AS3 implementations
9) both languages treat functions as first-class members



I could go on but seriously, the differences are fewer than the similarities. again this comes from someone who has coded quite a lot in both languages (though admittedly less in JS.)

I don't like CoffeeScript as it is simply another language translated into JavaScript. I want better pure JavaScript tools, not a converted language.


Also the iOS performance for Canvas since iOS 5+ has been (in my experience) quite impressive given the disparity with desktop computers computing power.

I vote HTML5 because I don't like Flash.

This is the worst reason to use one technology over another. Do not give in to personal bias.


As a long time Flash/AS3 guy, I have made the switch this year to HTML5. It's better than I expected - much better - but it's far from an equivalent to Flash.

A lot of things you can take for granted in Flash (animation, scaling, blend modes audio to name a few) are just not built into JS/HTML5 the same way. Audio especially is a can of worms and not completely taken care of.

What IS there is nice - Canvas is fairly high-performance at this point, and the 2D Drawing API is not a far cry from AS3's graphics API.


The real problem is the toolchain in Flash can't be beaten. JavaScript is loose to the point of insanity (absolutely NOTHING can be a constant. Feel like changing Math.PI? Go for it!) which makes creating solid development environments for JavaScript quite tricky. Meanwhile AS3 can be strongly typed til the cows come home and basically feels like more of a 'real' programming language.

I do love JavaScript's flexibility. It's a really cool language. I just wish there were better tools for developing in it.


One last thing. Learning ActionScript 3 now will prepare you very well for JavaScript. They are both ECMAScript based languages, to the point where if/when you make the switch, you will feel like you're writing pretty much the same code.


My 2¢

wow
also

I kind of love this

In my opinion, if you're going with digital painting, you want to use the highest resolution your engine can handle and scale down.

I love pixel art, but if you don't like the aesthetic of it, there's no point in using it just to fit in.

That said, if you're doubling or tripling pixels, pixel art is better suited, no question.

So I was working on an HTML5 twitter based game when Twitter kind of pulled the rug out from under me. The public API is all but gone and now you need to use OAuth to authenticate.

Not a big deal except I can't figure out a good way to use OAuth in pure client-side JavaScript without exposing the keys. I've researched a few solutions and I'd like some thoughts if people have them:

1) Make the game Chrome Web Store only and use something like http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tut_oauth.html for auth. I'm not entirely sure if this is actually secure though. Is it possible to grab Chrome Web Store source code for apps somehow (they seem to be stored locally, after all?)

2) Write a proxy server that does the OAuth connection behind the scenes and then passes specifically tailored information about queries back to the app. This has some mega issues in that the rate limit will be the server's, not the clients'. Also pretty much anyone can ping my server for query information if they're so inclined.

3) Rewrite the whole game in another language so the Oauth keys can at least be somewhat hidden (has anyone ever been concerned about people decompiling an app and stealing the OAuth keys? is this a valid security concern?)


I realize this is a bit specific but it'd be cool if anyone had ideas on how to approach it..

Greyhound buses are pretty darn cheap.

Edit: Just replayed the games I made last year and I forgot the punchline to the 2nd one.  lol, good times.

Finally! The truth comes out.

Pay closer attention to the first link I showed you to see the difference between analogic and complementary. These sorts of relationships have everything to do with how close colours are in hue together, and this is best shown visually (as the link shows...)

The fact that you see something ugly about any of the 0xff colors is a good start. It means you at least have the capability to see what is bad.

It will take practice. At first, just emulate the color schemes you like. If this means literally taking the eyedropper tool in photoshop and yanking those colours, so be it.

After a bit of copying, you should try to eyeball it. At least get in the ballpark of something acceptable.


Colour is just one small piece of art, and the "good" screenshot you linked is good not just because of its colour choices but the use of space, value and the proximity of groups of related items. It is well designed, not just a good colour palette. In fact I think some of the artists on this board could do a much better job in the colour selection.

The "bad" screenshots you posted are poorly designed. They are busy - the eye isn't lead anywhere, there is information overload and messy pixels strewn about carelessly in the effort to make it look like a populous starfield and nebula and to show all the interconnected nodes etc..


Design is a very complicated field. While learning colour selection will help you improve your design, if you wish to be good at it, you will need to be more of an artist too.

A lot of these are analogic or complementary color schemes. It's easier to show than tell, so just check this out:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

and for more inspiration, also: http://www.colourlovers.com/


(edit: there's a lot of teal and orange in those and it is pretty overdone, too. http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ca/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html )