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By Rich

Tags

Assembloids, Atari XE, quartet

Posted in

Retro

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Assembloids comes to the Atari XE

15th Jul 2013

0

Bear with me here. 3 years ago Ilija and I released a Flash and iOS game called Quartet. It was a curious little flixel powered puzzle game with cute pixel art and chip tunes. The concept was simple: move the bits of faces into the 4 quarters of the game to re-assemble the faces. The more complete the face, the better your score. Of course it gets faster and more furious until it’s game over.

Fast forward a few years and RGCD published the game for the Commodore 64 as a proper commercial boxed title (yes, really!) as well as a free download.

And now our little game seems to have jumped to another famous 8-bit from the 80s: this time to the Atari XE. Converted by Marek “Xeen” Cora of Agenda it’s a faithful looking reproduction indeed. Being the massive Atari fan I am this is great to see, and it’s great to see our games travel like this. We look forward to the full release (and if there were enough hours in the day I’d convert it to the Atari ST myself too 🙂 )

Watch Assembloids XE on YouTube or read more about it on AtariOnline.pl (in Polish, but Google Translate does an adequate job).
By Rich

Tags

amiga, atari st, codef, demos, html5

Posted in

Demoscene

2 comments

Whattaheck: The HTML5 demoscene

11th Jul 2013

2

Anyone who knows me knows about my love of all things linked to the Atari ST and Amiga demo scenes, going back multiple decades now. The site We Are Back has been actively converting lots of famous demo screens to html5. It’s great to see it has bought about the resurrection of some long since idle demo groups too. So here’s a very quick round-up of some of my favourite recent entries on the site:

D.O.C. Demo by SpeedStar

This is a legendary Amiga classic and very cleanly recreated.

Whattaheck by NewCore

This is one of the earlier Atari ST mega demos created by The Carebears (and friends). As was common with Atari ST demos you used the space bar to move from screen to screen rather than the mouse. On the main menu, as seen in the screen shot above, move to the DEMO NO. section and use the left/right arrows to change the screen and then space to load. There are 13 in total. NewCore has literally converted the entire demo, minus a few scroll texts, very impressive work indeed.

Hemoroids Rebirth by Hemoroids

This is different in that it’s an old Atari ST demo crew coming back from the grave and flexing their muscles with html5 instead. This is a brand new demo, made in a mostly old-skool style, but with new music, graphics and effects. Lovely to watch and even better in full-screen.

A La Melon by SoLo and TDK

Another new creation this time by SoLo and a bouncey chip track by TDK that’s a great tribute to the Amiga group Melon Design.

New demos get uploaded on an extremely regular basis and there is a very active Facebook group around WAB too. So if you have the desire to see some demoscene pixels blasted across your browser then I’d strongly recommend joining in.
By Rich

Tags

action, BBC, CBeebies, platformer, Tree Fu Tom

Posted in

Games

1 comment

Our Tree Fu Tom: Magic Dash HTML5 game is live

28th Jun 2013

1

We’re pleased to announce our latest HTML5 game has gone live on the BBC Cbeebies mobile site. Based on the extremely popular Tree Fu Tom TV show, Magic Dash see’s you running and leaping across 4 different stages, collecting magic sap and power-ups as you go. We’ve built a number of games for Cbeebies now and it was really great to do a proper action game.

Development at Photon Storm was lead by Jakub Joras with Tom Waterhouse handling graphics. Jakub pulled out all the stops to ensure the game ran as well as possible in mobile browsers. We were working from an existing Flash game created by Peg Digital, so the fun core game concept already existed as did a lot of the assets. But as is usual in moving from Flash to mobile we had to re-design the level layouts significantly and cut back on a few of the effects present in the desktop version. However we’re very pleased with the end result and what we managed to squeeze out of mobile browsers.

Play Tree Fu Tom: Magic Dash in your mobile/tablet browser.
By Rich

Tags

github, Phaser, physics

Posted in

Phaser

6 comments
Closing in on the Phaser 1.0 release

25th Jun 2013

6

Although the master branch of Phaser has been quiet for a couple of months we have been extremely busy working on what will be the 1.0 release. If you take a look at the 097 branch README you’ll get an idea of the sheer scale of change that has happened to the framework.

Although the initial release was heavily inspired by Flixel, indeed taking lots of the core classes and directly porting them over, this has been mostly reversed for 1.0. We hit limitations pretty quickly and were constantly stretching the framework in different directions until one day it finally snapped and we realised it needed a fresh approach.

So while the majority of the core classes have changed entirely, we’ve been extremely careful to ensure that actually using Phaser is just as easy as Flixel is (if not more so in some places!). We’ve worked really hard to make sure you can rapidly build games with it. For example the following code will create a new game, load an image, create a sprite and display it on-screen:
```
    var game = new Phaser.Game(this, 'game', 800, 600, init, create);

    function init() {
        game.load.image('bunny', 'assets/sprites/bunny.png');
        game.load.start();
    }

    function create() {
        game.add.sprite(0, 0, 'bunny');
    }
```
Needless to say the sprite is now under your full control. Alpha it, tween it, flip it, animate it, rotate it, move it around with touch/mouse/keyboard, collide it, emit it in the particle system, etc.

We’ve been hard at work creating several large games for clients with Phaser, so we’re able to battle test it and evolve it through actual use. The first of these games was released onto the BBC site last week, and although aimed primarily at small children it still allowed us to deploy a Phaser game to a heavily trafficked audience and gauge response.

So what’s new in 1.0?

Read More
By Rich

Tags

adobe max, presentation

Posted in

HTML5

12 comments

My Adobe Max session: HTML5 Gaming on the Mobile Web is now live on Adobe TV

31st May 2013

12

The session I gave at Adobe Max is now live on Adobe TV. The slides make a lot more sense when you can hear me giving my presentation alongside them. Please note that there is around 1 min of silence at the start of the video, but then it kicks off properly.