Social, Media & Games — Jaz-Lounge

Extra Credit episode about the importance of the pre-production phase of games

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:16:17 +0200

Extra Credit episode about the importance of the pre-production phase of games:

Although the topic are games, this also applies to other areas like web development!

Evaporating cooling effect

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:46:28 +0200

Evaporating cooling effect

CSS Step-Animation as replacement for JavaScript

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:45:42 +0200

CSS Step-Animation as replacement for JavaScript :

Read on developer.mozilla.org: Making animated Images with only CSS.

A note to myself: Check performance vs a pure JavaScript version.

Ask MDN Follow-up: HTML5 and games

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:36:46 +0200

Ask MDN Follow-up: HTML5 and games:

The transcription for the first Ask MDN event. (http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/08/ask-mdn-follow-up-html5-gaming-creative-javascript/)

Game mechanics in renovation works

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:04:24 +0100

Game mechanics can apply everywhere. Not only in games, or in childhood plays. They also provide good extra intrinsic motivations while renovating a flat.

For example: Take you have to paint all (or some) of your rooms new. Taking game mechanics into consideration, start with the smallest room and probably the smallest wall in it. Then paint! While you paint, you can count your progress. 10% 20%… and finally 100%. Hey! You leveled up. You are now Painter (level 2). Congratulations. Now pick the next wall, and go on, level 3 is waiting. After painting 4 Levels you are level 5. Time to meet the first ~~screen~~room-filling boss, Dr. Ceiling-of-the-smalles-room! Did you defeat it? Well, you now get the Badge “Painter of the smalles room in the house”. Do you want more? Then go on, there are more rooms to paint, more levels to level up, more badges to earn.

You get the picture? Great, now go and renovate your flat.

Btw: This game mechanic does not only apply to painting, you can also use it for more of your renovation work you have to do.

Teambased Projectmanagement tool

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:05:34 +0100

Teambased Projectmanagement tool:

Just found out about teambox.com. The first impression is simple, elegant and useful. It combines Taskmanagement (including assignment and priorization), some small wiki functionality (it has pages), twitter like conversations (so you can say what you are working on), file attachments and two organizational levels (projects and Tasklists).

After I tried that out a little while, I will make an update…

Yesterday morning I send around this link to some people in my...

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:58:03 +0100

Yesterday morning I send around this link to some people in my office. Since then it made it’s round through the whole company. So I think it is worth to be posted here.

It’s another good short rand about what is hindering us to work in the office. I believe I posted another one some time ago.

The all true and really funny fronteers10 talk of Jake Archibald...

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:40:00 +0200

The all true and really funny fronteers10 talk of Jake Archibald (former BBC employee now working in The Team). He talked about how to manage and build an Javascript API.

GameOn 2010

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:32:08 +0200

GameOn 2010:

I just registered for the GameOn 2010 of mozilla labs. But I’m not quite sure if I will submit the awesome swordnbow to this. I just had an idea for some other cool, funny, web two nully and probably highly addicting game. If someone is interested to participate and knows JavaScript, please let me know. Maybe we can team up for this one.

Just learned a valueable lesson or two

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:36:12 +0200

If you are using new or experimental technology, you have to bring time with you. At least if you try upgrading to a newer version. That could break things and it can be hassle to find the cause of the problem.

Also, if you have problems installing or uninstalling things with npm after you installed something, try upgrading npm. Another app you installed may have changed neccessary npm files and an older version can’t handle them and will throw strange errors.

Comparison between common dom insertion methods

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:04:52 +0200

Comparison between common dom insertion methods:

The first item of the swordnbow hackathon is done. The result is a small comparison to justify the design decisions of the mapengine. Check out the interesting results.

Interesting fact: My IE8 can appendChild an element much faster then any other browser, but its document Fragment it’s the worst thing for it. (This should be investigated further, because it really is non intuitive).

If someone with an iPhone or iPod can run this test and send me the results, that would be great, I’m interested how those compare on these devices.

I recommend seeing this video about game dynamics used in real...

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:35:00 +0200

I recommend seeing this video about game dynamics used in real life. It is really interesting and entertaining. The game dynamics he mentions are:

appointment dynamic
influence and status
progression dynamic
communal discovery

Node.js for swordnbow.com?

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:32:28 +0200

I’m thinking about rewriting swordnbow.com using node.js. Currently I’m working with PHP, but it doesn’t feel quite right. I always thought about using node.js for use in the chat part of sword’n’bow, but my latest thoughts and needed features all feel like: “Why the heck don’t use node.js for everthing?”. The only real thing against using node.js would be that I have to further delay the promised start of the beta, and experiment how good node.js really performs in a real world application. That too is really tempting.

To do? Or not to do?

Just watched this awesome presentation about building a...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:03:32 +0200

Just watched this awesome presentation about building a javascript game eninge from the guy behind the Aves Engine and who worked on jQuery UI.

There are some awesome learnings to do and it already makes me think about a version 2.0 of the mapengine behind Sword’n’Bow, which is close to a beta release.

Javascript rendering and reflow (performance tipps)

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:20:04 +0200

Javascript rendering and reflow (performance tipps):

I read that a longer time ago and forgot about it. And now I post it here, so hopefully it won’t happen again.

Fun (realtime web programming language)

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:57:33 +0200

Fun (realtime web programming language):

Fun shall be fun to use, uses node.js for server and promises to reduce the engineering complexity from dynamic websites with short- and long-pollings. That sounds promising and I will have an eye on it.

minimalistic javascript game "over the clouds"

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:06:46 +0200

minimalistic javascript game "over the clouds":

Use cursors to control the plane.

Objective: Collect as much coins as you can while avoiding the clouds, the aren’t as soft as you might think. Reload the browser to start a new game.

This is my first idea of a #js1k submission. That was already much (crazy) fun to build. But there is much time for competition left and I’m eager to see more crazy stuff.

Great speech about how to start a company and about what Lars...

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:55:03 +0200

Great speech about how to start a company and about what Lars Hinrichs new thing is about.

Just created cool css3 buttons using no extra markup at all and...

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:04:40 +0200

Just created cool css3 buttons using no extra markup at all and they look just great in Firefox and Safari. In IE they only look fine.

Funfact

Mon, 31 May 2010 19:23:10 +0200

The currect version of Swordnbow looks almost as it would participated in some css naked day, but has almost 700 lines of css code applied. Time to apply some colors and stuff.