Sam Loyd (1841–1911), American chess player and puzzle maker, created the sliding tiles puzzle in the 1870s. The puzzle is represented by an m×n grid, where m is number of columns and n is number of rows, and each cell can be any imaginable value (number, letter, image, and so on.)
The purpose of the puzzle is to rearrange the initial configuration of the tiles to match another... Read More
Visual effects in games define their overall look and feel, and gameplay. Players are attracted to high visual quality, which generate more traffic and reach. It’s key for creating successful games and providing a lot of fun for players.
In this article I want to present a few ideas of how to implement different visual effects in <canvas>-based HTML5 games. These examples will be... Read More
Mobile application ecosystems — let’s count Android and iOS here — are unbelievably dynamic, but they also suffer from both software and hardware fragmentation. This is especially true for Android, but fragmentation also exists in the iOS ecosystem, as experienced with the rollout of iOS 8. As the latest version of iOS was released, many existing apps were made clumsy on updated devices.
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Are you a web designer or developer who dreams about creating a mobile game and bringing it to the app store? We have good news: Your road to the app store might be shorter than you think! And if you can recall your experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform from days of old, then you’ll even have a shortcut.
Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this... Read More
When our HTML5 game Numolition was nearly done, we decided to throw it all away and rebuild it in Unity. That turned out to be an exciting and valuable experience, and one that I thought would be worth sharing with other Web developers. Come in, the water’s warm!
Last year, we released a mobile game named Quento. It was written entirely in HTML5, wrapped in our proprietary PhoneGap... Read More
Animation makes games real. Movement adds excitement to a game and makes the characters more realistic. In this article, we’ll look at the Cocos2D library and how it supports programmatic animations in iPhone games.
This article is part of a series that teaches you how to create iPhone games based on the open-source game Seven Bridges. Make sure to check out the first article in the... Read More
I love games and I’m a huge math nerd, so I made a new iPhone game based on a famous math problem called The Seven Bridges of Königsberg. I’m selling it in the App Store, but I also want to share it with everyone, so I made it open source.
This article is the first in a series that will walk through iOS programming using this game as an example. This first article gives you an overview... Read More
Care to make a cross-platform mobile game with HTML5? No need to dabble in Java or Objective-C? Bypass the app stores? Sounds like an instant win! A handful of game developers are pushing the envelope of mobile HTML5 games at the moment. Check out the likes of Nutmeg and Lunch Bug for some shining examples.
The great thing about these titles is that they work equally well on both mobile... Read More
I sincerely believe that the user experience community should add game design to its toolbox of competencies. If we’re truly committed to creating satisfying user experiences, then there’s no reason why games, which can satisfy people so richly, should be excluded.
Operating successfully in the games domain means learning a new set of competencies, and I don’t want to oversimplify the... Read More
