Grammerjack

In the late 1980's Jordan Mechner single-handedly designed and programmed the original Apple II version of Prince of Persia and several other groundbreaking games. He published his development journals and technical design documents on his web site. The journals touch on: The development of the stop-motion animation techniques used so effectively in PoP The tension in Jordan's life between his two callings: game development and feature film scriptwriting / directing. The difficulties involved in developing and selling a new game idea. A view into the late 80's / early 90's pre-web game development business. Although many games are now written by large teams of people, in the end, a lot of the business, artistic, and technical issues Jordan writes about remain relevant. I highly recommend these journals for anyone interested in an inside view of game development. (Or anyone interested in trying to break into Hollywood. :-) )

This weekend I wrote a Javascript clone of the old Atari "Breakout" game. Thanks to the "Canvas" tag it was very easy to write, but I did run into a few problems: Javascript math is always floating point, so I had to use the "Math.floor" function to convert the results of a division to an integer. This was in the brick collision detection logic, where I am converting the ball's (x,y) coordinates to the bricks that the ball might be hitting. I was evaluating document.getElementById too early in the document lifecycle, before the corresponding elements existed. This took me a long time to diagnose -- I ended up just moving the getElementById calls to their run-time use, rather than trying to cache the results. Jack's Brick Break Breakout clone

This weekend I wrote a JavaScript version of my old Atari 800 game Dandy. Check it out: Web Dandy It was my first JavaScript application. It was about as easy as writing the Python version. I have only tested it in two browsers so far (Firefox 3.0 and Chrome), and only on one platform OSX. I have already run into differences between the two browsers: Firefox 3.0 for OSX seems to double-post keydown events. No sound or multiplayer yet. Oh, and I use the CANVAS tag, so I think older browsers (like IE 7) won't work.

Peter Moore on Xbox I always liked Peter Moore, and I was sorry when he left Xbox for EA. He's given a very good interview on his time at Sega and Microsoft. (He ran the Xbox game group at Microsoft before moving on to Electronic Arts.) Lots of insight into the Xbox part of the game industry. Here he is talking about Rare: ...and you know, Microsoft, we'd had a tough time getting Rare back – Perfect Dark Zero was a launch title and didn't do as well as Perfect Dark… but we were trying all kinds of classic Rare stuff and unfortunately I think the industry had past Rare by – it's a strong statement but what they were good at, new consumers didn't care about anymore, and it was tough because they were trying very hard - Chris and Tim Stamper were still there – to try and recreate the glory years of Rare, which is the reason Microsoft paid a lot of money for them and I spent a lot of time getting on a train to Twycross to meet them. Great people. But their skillsets wer...

I finally got a Nintendo Wii this weekend. Wii's are in fairly short supply right now, so I couldn't find one at a reasonable price on-line. If you live in the Seattle area, here's my Wii-finding tip: Fred Meyer stores get deliveries on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, meaning that calling a Fred Meyer store at 7am on Sunday morning to check if they received a new shipment is a good way to find a Wii. The total cost, with tax, an extra controller, and a component video cable was around $350. I've got Wii Sports, Wii Play, and will be picking up Mario Galaxy this week. The primary users will probably be my kids, although I am very interested in trying out Mario Galaxy. As a former Xbox 360 developer, I couldn't help comparing the Wii to the Xbox 360. So far I give the Wii high marks for: It's small and quiet. It starts up quickly. The dashboard UI is very clean and pleasant. The low-res (480p component) graphics are quite good. I did occasionally see jaggies, fo...