Earlier this year I redeveloped my affiliate costume store from the ground up. Costume-Depot.com got a full overhaul from the back end to the front end. It is pretty slick and you should really go check it out. However affiliate marketing is pretty tough these days. I’m not particularly gifted with advertising and marketing knowledge or even a lick of business sense for myself. So for me to bring value to my affiliate customers I’ve taken the full transparency approach. I don’t hide what the sites are and I don’t try to trick people.
That being said I had to ask myself the question, “How do I bring eye balls to my costume store?” Enter: TinyWitch.
With as much fun as I had with kaBOOM! I knew that game development was something I was going to explore a lot more. Specifically I was going to be targeting HTML5 Games as it is “What I know.” I looked at a few different HTML5 frameworks for making games and even tried to make some stuff without one. In the end I settled on Phaser 2.0. Phaser is AWESOME and the HTML5 game development community around it are all a great bunch of folks who help one another.
So with my new tools it was time to try and make something. I figured I would start out with something basic and Halloween-ish. A simple time waster type of game you could play for a little bit and stop. I settled on the classic arcade style shooter. This enabled me to learn the fundamentals of Phaser and also of game development in general. As many games as I have played throughout my life I never until know really had to sit down and be in that creative drivers seat. So it was a new experience for me.
Understanding the core mechanics of “how a game works” came pretty quickly to me. It is mostly pretty intuitive if you have been programming for a long time. The update loop, building functions to destroy, create and move assets around was easy to conceptualize.
I also knew I wanted to have that “App Store experience” so I was determined to port TinyWitch to the Google Play store. I used ludei’s CocoonJS builder to package up my game and build the APK.
So check it out @ http://tinywitch.devdm.com or download it to your Android Device on the Playstore. Hope you can have a little fun with it.
In our house we have an iPad 3 and the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity. I also have an 8 year old little girl that is constantly wanting to play games with me (both a blessing and a curse I assure you). She is still a kid and I don’t really need her to be submerged in the world of PC gaming so that leaves us with the tablets/phones. These are the games I’ve found that we can play together.
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MinecraftMinecraft is our number 1 pick usually. She can run around and play pretend things while I work on the fortress and slay zombies. |
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Toss The BallA nice throw back to Skee Ball. She might not ever experience a good game of Skee Ball and the “Boss-Walk” through the arcade with a fist full of tickets. This is as close as we get for now. |
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Mini-motorIt reminds me of Micro Machines. I’m not sure they even make them anymore but it was as close to a real life SIMs as you could get when I was a kid. It is a fun top down racer. It took her a little while to master the controls and now she beats me all the time. |
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Muffin KnightWe just got this one. You bounce around as two little guys on the screen and collect muffins to upgrade yourself to the different classes. |
http://mashable.com/2011/11/25/iphone-android-multiplayer-games/
To continue to find fun and exciting uses for my Sixaxis Dualshock 3 I’ve been driven to emulate as much as possible. We have already shown what can be done with n64oid to turn your Transformer Infinity into a Nintendo 64. Now we will move on to something a little more cool, “Playstation.” To emulate the first generation Playstation and play any PSX roms you need a couple of things.
Things you will need:
There are a TON of settings you can tweak inside the app so you should be able to get it working on your device if you are persistent. The setup is basic:
Install the App -> Download Bios File -> Download Optional Open GL plugin -> The app will ask you the location of the Bios File right away -> Download .bin/.ecm (to convert to bin) PSX roms -> Play.
There was only one funky thing with my Dualshock 3 and that was that the square-triangle-circle-cross buttons where all rotated clockwise one button. So when playing a game: square was the triangle button, Circle was triangle and so on. I was too lazy to try and go through to fix it so I just play with them like that.
Games I’ve played so far: Crash Bandicoot 2, Tomb Raider Chronicles, Harry Potter and Philosophers Stone, and Spyro the Dragon. Here is a list of working/nonworking Roms so you know what to spend your time trying to get. Sadly FFVII is still just as bad as it is on any other emulated platform. Doesn’t seem like we’ll ever get it this way.. but… “Sup Bro!”
Popular with me that is!
While I’m on a role of blog posting here are the games I played on my Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T for the month of March!
Most Played
Most played this month has to be Minecraft P.E. I’ve got an 8 year old in the house and she uses the iPad to play with me over WiFi. She LOVES it and constantly bugs me to play it. There are some screen shots in the gallery of our “Candy Kingdom” and her Adventure Time creations. She has made nearly 99% of all the stuff in the land on her own.
Newest Game
Ravensword 2 aka Ravensword: Shadowlands. Great game so far. Really makes a good effort to create an Elderscrolls experience on the Tablet/Phone. I also play Aralon: Sword and Shadow but it is becoming dated and it isn’t nearly as polished as Ravensword 2 is. The graphics are better with Ravensword 2 and there are multiple quest lines to do and areas to explore. Aralon is very linear. I don’t have a rating system but if I did this would get all the points but the last one. Nothing ever gets ALL the points.
Enjoying
I’m enjoying a few different titles sporadically. These are the games you fire up once in a while for about 10 minutes and then stop. Final Fantasy Dimensions is one of those. Blah blah all the shit you have heard before. In the end it is what it looks like. If you liked Final Fantasy on the NES or SNES you will like this.
Honorable Mentions:
My wonderful girlfriend got me a Dualshock 3 Sixaxis controller for my birthday. This was super exciting for me because it opens up the Infinity to a whole new level of gaming as this controller is Bluetooth.
Truth time. I am not a huge fan of touch screens for controlling games. Navigating around, manipulating media, and the general day to day is fine. Typing? Prefer the physical keyboard. Gaming? Prefer a keyboard and mouse but will be happy with a controller.
I use the Sixaxis app to connect the controller to my Transformer Infinity. There are plenty of tutorials and instructions out there on how to use this utility to pair your PS3 controller. Here is one.
I’m using a popular Nintendo 64 emulator called n64oid. It is no longer on the Play Store so you will have to track it down manually if that is the one you want to use. There are others available but I’ve not used any of them.
You’ll notice the screen shots below of Super Mario 64 are using the high resolution texture packs. These things are awesome! and make the game look so much nicer.
Tips and Tricks I learned along the way:
I’ve not tested the whole heap of roms but I have tested quite a few. Below are some screen shots from my favorites.
