Category: 8bitrocket
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HTML5 Canvas On The 4th Of July : Atari 2600 Inspired Fireworks Demo And (Short) Tutorial
For the 4th of July, here is an Atari 2600 inspired fireworks demo in HTML5. Click the mouse button to explode a firework shell. This demo was originally designed to test our particle FX engine for the HTML Canvas with an object pool. While I don’t have enough…
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HTML5 Canvas : Animating Gradients To Create A Retro Atari Style Color Cycle
We just finished our semi-final run into the Atari Pong Developer Contest last week, but I’m still feeling a little “retro”. This weekend I decided to see if I could replicate an old-style Atari color-cycle in HTML5 using the Canvas API alone: no bitmaps or anything other helpers. The…
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Thing’s We’ve Learned The Hard Way #7: Development Contests
Things We’ve Learned The Hard Way #7: Development Contests
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Pong Developer Challenge : Reality Bites
I’ve searched for the past few days to find comments on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and most everything I’ve read gives us a very small chance of getting any further in the contest. The only positive comments I have seen are for AR Pong and Pong World, both…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge : 15 Semi-Finalist Videos Posted, Ours Included
Atari has posted the finalist videos for the Pong Developer Challenge, ours included. Only 15 of 20 videos made the cut, so either some were not up to snuff, or five of the 20 semi-finalists did not made the deadline. By the way, the competition looks TOUGH. Our approach…
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Canvas-A-Go-Go: Lessons Learned From Teaching HTML5 Canvas at One Of Top Tech Companies On Earth
This week I spent a couple days on-site at “a very large technology company in the Silicon Valley”, working for a technical education company named Marakana, teaching a class on the HTML5 Canvas. Before I visited, I knew very little about the company. I knew they were an I.T. company. I…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge : Crossing The Finish Line, Dreams Intact
A couple days ago was the deadline to have our demo and video submission for the Atari Pong Developer challenge . However, since I was travelling to San Jose teach a class on the HTML5 Canvas at Cisco this week, there is no way I could upload our submission…
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Atari Pong Development Challenge Diary #3: On The Shoulders Of Giants
By Steve Fulton We spent the last day of our short trip to Yosemite visiting the Mariposa Grove, an expansive area with a collection of giant Sequoia trees in the southern part of the National park. As we walked through the grove, crunching through the spring snow in our water-proof…
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Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #2: Inspiration In Yosemite Valley
I’m still on my little trip with my family, trying to recharge my batteries after a year of turmoil, and hoping to find inspiration for my entry into Atari’s Pong Development Challenge. As I described in entry #1, I had already discovered I wanted to make game that played fast.…
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Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #1: A Trip To Sierra Online Ground Zero
I’ve been planning my entry for Atari’s Pong Development Challenge for past few weeks, the but I’ve hit a brick wall with a few elements. I still hope to have my working prototype done for submission on April 15th, even though the rules only require a design document. I…
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Nolan Bushnell Speaks About The Atari PongDevChallenge (video)
By Jeff Fulton [iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/x2u6YFtSaXE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Atari’s PongDevChallenge is still moving along. Atari sent us this press release yesterday, and it alludes to the video above. “The #PongDevChallenge is in full swing. With one month left to go for developers to submit their ideas for a chance…
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Atari Clarifies Pong Indie Developer Challenge Royalties
We received this from Atari’s PR Team today to clarify royalties on winning games: “Pong Indie Developer Challenge was conceived as a way for the gaming community to celebrate Atari’s and Pong’s upcoming 40th anniversary. It is a great opportunity for indie developers to have a successful launch on a…
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Instead Of Lighting Up The Indie Game Dev Community, Atari Pong Contest Raises Familar Questions About Ownership And Intellectual Property
“Enter Game Development Contests At Your Own Risk!” We’ve written about this in the past, both online and in our book The Essential Guide To Flash Games. “Game Contests” are not always what they seem. Not “all” mind you, but many “contests” are simple ways for sites and publishers…
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While iOS Builds, we play Atari 800 Games
(Jeff Fulton) The History of Apple (early at least) and Atari are linked together in many ways, so it is fitting that while we compile iOS apps, we play Atari 800 games on the machine next to the Mac. Thought it would be fun and nostalgic to post these today.
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Up Atari’s Sleeve: An $100,000 iOS Game Contest To Reimagine Pong!
So, what Atari had up it’s sleeve was a $100,000 contest to re-imagine Pong. While this might appear to be a let-down for fans angling for something new (i.e Roller Coaster Tycoon 4, Food Fight 2012), for indie developers it’s an AMAZING CHANCE to help redefine the quintessential…
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Atari has something up its’ sleeve…
So Atari has something special to announce tomorrow. We are hoping it is something classic…
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Flash Gaming Summit Coming up Fast! (March 4th)
The Flash Gaming Summit returns again this year as the première event for Flash game developers. We were honored to both be invited to speak (we could not sync up our plans unfortunately) and to be judges in the game competition. We LOVED the first one we attended, and…
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Interesting notes on External Interface JavaScript Call-Backs To Flash
This week we had a big project due for a new Movie that is coming out in a few weeks time. The majority of the site was built-in Flash but I needed to use an External Interface call to JavaScript in order to display dynamic content…
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Atari Nerd Fantasy: What If Our Games Had Been Released As Cartridges For A Classic Console (photo)
We were thinking over the weekend that it would be nice to have some kind of physical way to represent the many games we have made over the years. Since most of them have been web games, they are fleeting digital objects to everyone (except us that is!). We decided…
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Italian Review of HTML5 Canvas : fantastico!
Here is a review of our book HTML5 Canvas in Italian. The English translation appears to be pretty positive, however, the Italian looks better…so here is a quote in Italian: L’esempio che viene discusso e realizzato è veramente fantastico: un video puzzle. Si tratta di un video che viene diviso…
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8bitrocket 5 Year Anniversary : Throwing Up the Past and Top-10 Of Everything We could Think Of
Today is our 5 year anniversary. It’s been a roller-coaster-ride-kinda-year here at 8bitrocket Towers, with many ups and downs, sharp turns and thrills, but at the end of the ride, we just feel like throwing up. When we started 5 years ago, there were almost no sites talking about making…
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8bitrocket Blows The Roof Off DevCon5! :)
Well, maybe the roof stayed on, but our presentations were a quite bit more successful than we imagined. We’ve received tons of feedback, and it’s all been great. Maybe we should do this kind thing more often… We met some awesome people and had a great time spending some book…
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DevCon5 Santa Clara Live Blog
7:59 : 8bitsteve: Sending last Skype messages to colleagues at Electrotank. Finished the presentation last night. Actually, 2 presentations. Spent tons of free time in past 2 weeks creating demos for the conference. My actual fear right now: no one will show-up. 9:10 : 8bitsteve :Just arrived at the gate…
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Steve and I will be presenting on the HTML5 Canvas at Devcon5 on Wedensday
The conference is in Santa Clara on Wednesday and Thursday. We have a three hour block from 2-5PM on Wednesday to present. The first half will be an introduction to the Canvas and some actual code examples to get everyone familiar with the basics. The second half will be a demonstration of quite…
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Cerebral Fix CEO Ben Dellaca Says They Just “Discovered” Mid-Core Gaming. We Beg To Differ.
In an article at games.blog.com Cerebral Fix CEO Ben Dellaca says they just discovered “Mid-core Gaming”: Is Zynga dominating social games on Facebook so much, that it’s, in a way, killing it? I go to all of the conferences and I’m forever seeing developers who are actually looking at the likes of…
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Who Cares! Well, actually, Producto Studios and The Who Do!
8bitrocket in conjunction Producto Studios is proud to be a small part to a big cause. Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, and Dave Grohl rocked an amazing fundraiser to benefit the UCLA Daltrey/Townshend Teen Cancer Program and Producto rocked the website design. Long time “bandmate” of Producto’s Simon Hinchliffe designed the site and…
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Happy Thanksgiving From 8bitrocket.com
(turkey image borrowed from here, turned into ASCII here)
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Press Release: 8bitrocket.com’s Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton to Discuss the Emerging Role of Canvas Development At DevCon5 in Santa Clara, Dec. 7-8, 2011
8bitrocket.com’s Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton to Discuss the Emerging Role of the Canvas Development Environment At DevCon5 in Santa Clara, California, December 7-8, 2011 Norwalk, CT, November 10, 2011— TMC and Crossfire Media announced that Steve Fulton and Jeff Fulton, co-founders of 8bitrocket.com and authors of the best-selling…
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Now Don’t Get Cocky “Web Standards” Dudes, HTML5 Still Has A Looooooooong Way To Go.
Two days ago Adobe announced that were were ceasing development of the Flash player for the mobile web, in favor of HTML5. They will focus on the air packagers and PC/Mac browser plugins. Technologically speaking, nothing has really changed, as Adobe already had an issue with Flash not being…
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One Day After Adobe Retreats Flash From The Mobile Web: Our HTML5 Canvas Book Hits #1 On The Game Programming Chart At Amazon.com
Also, it has the lowest ranking it has ever achieved too.
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Adobe Drops Mobile Browser Flash Support : Are You Ready To Stop Thinking We Are Crazy And Learn About The HTML5 Canvas ?
So, we’ve heard “through the grapevine” that many of our old readers and Flash Game colleagues were pretty skeptical about our choice to tackle the HTML5 Canvas. Jeff and I have always tried to figure out new trends early, and most of the time we are Too Early (i.e we…
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Flash Is Dead? Games Volume Grows And Multi-player Pays Off: An Interview With Mochi Media
Recently we caught-up with Alexander Shen from Mochi Media to ask him about the state of Mochi and viral Flash Games. His responses are truly enlightening. Far from Flash being dead and buried, it appears that both the volume of Flash games, and the success stories of Flash game developers…
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And the Man on the Hill said HTML5, build it and they will come…
This really is just a “state of the union” for 8bitrocket (8bitsteve and 8bitjeff) to go over some of the events that have transpired over the first 9 months of the year. We like to keep these brief (this one is anything but), and put them in the…
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Our HTML5 Canvas Book Already Made a Profit
Less than 5 months after being published and in spite of one Amazon reviewer that was angry because the book was too long (?) and targeted at beginners (not entirely correct, by way) we received a modest royalty check for Q2 2011 this week. This means that we have already covered our advance and are now…
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Literally, there would be no 8bitrocket without Steve Jobs
8bitSteve , Eric Barth, and I literally created our first “8bitrockets” by programming long basic programs on Eric’s Apple IIe. The programs used the Print statement and ASCII character set to slowly scroll our Star Wars inspired creations on the Apple green screen monitor. Sitting around in our…
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A small case study in a Flash to iPad HTML5 Conversion
The Project A few weeks ago, John and I over here at Producto Studios were asked to create an interactive, single-page, Power-Point style application for a small company (in Flash). The app was to contain multiple drop-down box syle animations that revealed bullet points and a screen filled with “touch”…
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On to…Electrotank
8bitsteve here. So I’ve just finished a stint at the company “that shall not be named” after an experience that I can only describe with the words “no comment“. After a week of trying to figure out my next move, some friends from the gaming technology company Electrotank have asked…
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How Adobe Can Win The Flash War
We here at 8bitrocket.com love Flash. Sure we also have a fondness for the HTML5 Canvas, but we still love Flash and have no desire to see it disappear. We also have not seen a real change in how much Flash development we are asked to do, in fact, if…
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Why I love The Flash Platform
The simple answer is that it is just as fun as using my Atari 800 or Atari ST. I assume the same goes for you Apple IIe/ IIGS / Mac Classic folks as well as the C64 / Amiga, and Tandy, Speccy, BBC Micro, MSX, and Amstrad crowds. Making your computer…
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Dear Large Game Development Company Engineering Job. It’s not you, it’s me. Thanks for the memories. We can still be linked in buddies if you want to.
Dear Large Game Company Engineering Job. It all seemed so great at the beginning (don’t they all?). Our courtship was a whirlwind romance of travel, interviews with interesting people, deep thoughtful discussions on game design, and veiled promises of the riches that might befall us if the fruits of our…
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