Mobile games development

Since iPhone’s arrive in Italy seems to be near, here’s a first port of AnimaLogic, one of the first web runtime games!

You can try a first (very beta, as always :)) version here.

I’ve got some fun with my friend Fabio in creating a first game for Nokia Web Runtime.

Since Web Runtime allows building mobile applications with classic web technologies, we’ve used nothing more that html, css and plain-old-good javascript… isn’t it great?

It’s a very first alpha release with not too much functionalities (local hi-scores and a single game mode), but feel free to take a try

The main interface was done using classical <a> elements to represent the menu options, but this has 2 important drawbacks, as you can see:

• links (like also input fields and other focusable elements) when focused are surrounded by a thick border: not really beautiful..
• managing of focus itself, between different screens, is not easy, so it happens that focus sometimes disappears, or starts from the last menu options, or other odd things.

Next release will try to solve those and other issues… meanwhile, we’ll be happy of any kind of feedback about it

Download Web Runtime AnimaLogic

You know, my great passion are games, and here’s a first game-related tutorial

Often in games a nice feature to give to users it the possibility to customize their own character, for example changing colors of the different parts (hairs, eyes, shirt, and so on).

To support this features there are 2 possibilities:

• Include a different image for each color of each different part
• Replace colors by code

The second options will save you the effort to create these multiple images, and will strip down your JAR size. Also, it will allow you to support a lot more colors.

You can see a simple midlet showing how this can be done with simple code on the emulator page

For the full source code you can visit the Forum Nokia Wiki page: J2ME Customizing Game Sprites Color