Category: Things I’m Making

Too quiet.

LET'S MAKE SOME NOISE, AND SOMEHOW RESIST DOING SO BY INCREASING THE FONT SIZE!!!!

Every month for the rest of the year, college workload permitting, I shall release one creative work from the following list. Items marked with an asterisk are closest to completion, and yes, "every month" includes this one.

• * Zapster Solitaire 0.8: A card game based on the standard 52-card deck. It's mostly luck-based, but there is a limited-use mechanic to keep you interested.
• * Random Bookmark: A Firefox extension to pick a bookmark at random from a chosen folder and open it.
• Yin-Yang It (this name may change): An arcade game that has you controlling the two dots of the Yin-Yang symbol simultaneously.
• Wackyland v2: A truly mobile-friendly Wacky Theater with a new cartoon, plus the new location Wacky Labs, where humor is not just art, but SCIENCE!
• Zapster Solitaire 1.0: Zapster Solitaire 0.8 + audio + original artwork for Jacks, Queens, and Kings.
• Signs of Life v2: Many new puzzles (most of which will require payment), an easy way to compare scores with friends, and vastly-improved presentation will make Signs of Life a much more impressive game.

September 1 update: Wow, that plan worked out fantabulously, didn’t it, Internet? Eh, I’m still going to have five of the above out by the end of the year, just on a slightly denser release schedule.

I had what I thought was a neat idea once: Create JavaScript apps that explicitly supported the Wii’s Internet Channel, with special controls enabled for the Wii Remote. These days, I don’t think that idea is worth it, so I’m abandoning it.

Nintendo’s basically ignoring the Internet Channel. They’re not doing anything to promote it beyond what they’ve already published, and more importantly they’re not updating it. That means developers of made-for-Wii content won’t get any new functionality (access to the B button on the browsing remote would have been nice…) or any of the performance boosts and standards support improvements from anything beyond Opera 9.30. With the Wii U on the way, I don’t foresee this situation improving.

The rest of the world seems to be ignoring it, too. There seems to have been practically no buzz about it, save some murmurs of excitement and a joke or two when it first came out. marketshare.hitslink.com reports 0.00% market share, which is probably rounded, but still pretty darn low.

Creating made-for-Wii apps accomplished two awesome things. #1, it allowed the player to play these games while holding an NES gamepad-like device. If you’re the sort of gamer that I am, you know the importance of holding a controller in your two hands to play games. (Which is to say, not at all important, but we like it, dang it.) #2, that combined with saving game data on the server freed you from the PC and let you take your game experience to another device.

For #1, I’d like for Web games to be able to use actual gamepads on the PC. I’ll pursue this soon.

For #2, if the buzz surrounding iStuff & Android is any indication, the best way to do that is to make my apps mobile-friendly. I shall do that, then. This will be somewhat hindered by my not actually owning a mobile device that does Web browsing, but with any luck I’ll be able to borrow my mom’s phone every now and then. (Hi, Mom! 😀 )

So yeah, those are my plans, let the past be past and ROCKET FORWARD IN BLAZING GLORY, at least when I get around to picking up the pace on my projects.

P.S.: Because it doesn’t make much sense to update an app just to remove a feature, Signs of Life and Wackyland will keep their Wii-specific features until I have real updates for them.