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Pong Returns : Postmortem For The Atari Pong Indie Developer Challenge
Atari announced the finalists for their Pong Developer Challenge on June 26th, and we were not included on this. Thus, our time as part of the Atari Pong Indie Developer Challenge comes to a close. In this post-mortem we look back at what we think we did wrong,…
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Flash CS6 + Our Book On Flash + iOS = Surprisingly Good Performance. I Feel Vindicated
A couple years ago, Jeff and I published The Essential Guide To Flash Games through Friends Of Ed. At nearly the EXACT moment the book went into print, the whole Apple/Flash/iPad flap blew-up the Flash world. What we thought would be the culmination of 10 years of…
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In His Latest Column, Bob Cringley Finally Tackles The Current State Of I.T.
Bob Cringley has finally done it. He has finally written a column that tries to tackle the current sad state of corporate IT. You have to read until the end, but in a single paragraph he crystalizes the issue: “Against this we have a cadre of IT workers who have…
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Sim City Social : Social Game Perfection, Cynical Game Design
Yesterday I sat down to try Sim City Social. I, honestly, wanted to see how EA had translated one of my favorite old school games to the Facebook platform. I was not playing as a “joke” or just because I wanted rant about it, I honestly was hoping…
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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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Producto Studios Video for GE.
Over at Producto Studios, we are doing far more than just making it into the semi-finals of the Pong Developer Challenge. Here’s a fun cartoon we just wrapped up working with our buddy Michael Bly and his new studio Balihoo Productions. It’s a timeline on the history of gas pumps…
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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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*New Book Celebrates Atari For It’s 40th Anniversary*
(Atari Book Press Release) Authors tell the fun and inspirational stories behind the iconic founding brand of the video game industry. New York, June 27th, 2012 — Today, people ask, “Do you play video games?” but in the 70’s and 80’s, people asked, “Do you play ATARI?” The video game…
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I Wish I Had Made That! Dragon Fantasy From Muteki Corp
Dragon Fantasy This is a new column named “I Wish I Had Made That!” where we explore games that are so close to our hearts, that we wish we had made them ourselves. In fact, most will be games that we started and never finished, and someone has beaten us…
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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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Be Excellent To Each Other
This is a story only a few people know. But it has been a year now and I think I am ready to tell it to anyone who is willing to read it. Early in the morning, June 1, 2011, I had a vivid dream. I don’t ever remember my…
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Memorial Day Tribute To The Uncle I Never Knew : PFC John Fulton Jr. KIA 10/24/44
When I was little my dad told me a single story about World War II. He told no stories about his time in the army other than this single story. It was about the day he knew he was going to die. He was in Italy in 1945 serving with…
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Having a awesome publisher has its little perks.
So, today, out of the blue, I receive two (one for Steve and one for me) packages in the mail. Inside each is a very nicely framed copy of the front cover of our HTML5 Canvas Book on O’Reilly Press. Maybe they sent them because it is selling well (it…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Inspiration: Pong In The Wild At The Redondo Beach Fun Factory
Today I took my daughter to the last remaining arcade from my youth, the Redondo Beach Fun Factory. I wanted to give her a chance to ride some of the vintage electro-mechanical vehicles in the establishment before they all disappear. While we were there, I went looking for an…
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Atari Announces Intriguing “Circus Atari” App for iOS
Atari announced that tomorrow, a free iOS app named Circus Atari” will be available in the App Store. The original Circus Atari for the Atari 2600 was compelling game that blended physics and Breakout. It was one of the best 2600 games of all time. [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/zGNAA9_8-EY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe]…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Diary: What The Radio Shack “TV Scoreboard” Taught Me About Game Design.
One day, back in 1978 my dad came home with this: [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/6quqAff5fO8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] A Radio Shack, TV Scoreboard console. We had been begging my dad to let us play the Atari 2600 console in the TV department at Fedmart on every visit, so he knew…
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Not Flash! : The Angsty Zeitgeist Of HTML5 Technology Burnout
More than two years ago we started taking a close look at the HTML5. To us, the HTML5 features like <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> were the most compelling part of the HTML5 spec because they were poised to be a true replacements for Flash. Flash had been our tool…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Inspiration Video #1
Here is a video we created to help inspire our team while we work on our entry for the semi-final round of the Atari Pong Developer Challenge. We used a classic Atari color cycling Fuji symbol (of our own design) with images of some of Atari’s early Pong coin…
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Cracked.com Chose One Of Our Images For “Video Game Plot Twists That Would Have Blown Your Mind”
By Steve Fulton A few weeks ago I wrote an article about my efforts as complete “non-artist” to create funny, classic video game inspired photo-shopped images for Cracked.com “Photoplasty” weekly contests. The gist of the story was that, even though cracked.com never features any of my images, the effort…
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The Day “Retro” Became Cool or R.I.P. MCA
By Steve Fulton In 1994, about a week after I moved out of my parents house and into an apartment with my brother, our cable TV was installed. For the first time in my entire life, I could watch MTV any time I wanted. When I turned on…
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Flash Professional CS6 Includes Sprite Sheet Generator
Wow. It seems like just a few years ago, we here at 8bitrocket.com were the only ones talking about using sprite sheets with Flash, and now Adobe has embraced the idea, adding support to export Flash animations as sprite sheets. This is a GREAT feature that will help keep Flash…
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Randomness: The Best Cartoon ever Made: Feed The Kitty (now on youtube.com)
[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VTorphrBlPY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] This doesn’t look like it was posted by a legit source, so enjoy it while you can.
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Why I think Side-By-Side Gaming On Mobile Devices Would Benefit Young Children
By Jeff Fulton The modern-school playground, sans technology, not-that-different from-1977 and what game developers can learn from it. My mornings are usually very busy. Normally I am up and out by 6:30 for a work out or training for a race (or injury recovery) and then I hit the Producto…
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New Issue Of Distro Shouts-Out My Articles On Atari For Gamasutra
I downloaded the new issue of Distro, the Engadget tablet magazine today because it had an article on Atari, and what did I find? A cool shout-out to the articles on Atari I wrote for Gamasutra a few years back! The shout-out is to the right. You can download the…
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A Nerd Is Born: Star Wars In-Person At Toys ‘R Us September 1977 (updated)
I’m been a consumer of nerd-laden toys and video games for most of my life. There is not a January that goes by that does not see me searching through the After-Christmas red-tag bins at Target, looking for mark-downs on video games and toys that I others would shudder at…
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The incredible story of Atari 2600 Star Castle
By Jeff Fulton Star Castle was one of thee very first arcade games that Steve and I (along with Eric Barth) became addicted to in the early 1980’s. There was a simplicity to the design and the objective that made it as addicting as any other game made in the…
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O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our DRM-Free HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff
By Jeff Fulton O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff: Use code: DRMFREE http://oreil.ly/Against-DRM Well, actually, all of their e-book are 50% off, but why not pick up a copy of our hot selling HTML5 Canvas book. All O’Reilly e-books are DRM free…
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Hit Testing For Accessibility May Be Added To The W3C HTML5 Canvas Specification. What Does It Mean For Game Developers?
By Steve Fulton While searching for the updated W3C HTML 2d Context (Canvas) API Specification today I ran into some some references to a new feature the W3C has proposed to add the Canvas Spec: Hit Testing . It has been known for quite some time that the HTML5 Canvas,…
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Semifinals, Here We Come! Producto Studios Makes It Into The Next Round Of The Atari Pong Developer Challenge!
By Steve Fulton Atari announced the semifinalists for their Pong Developer Challenge today, and Producto/8bitrocket Studios made the cut! Now we have to actually make the game we designed. I can’t wait to get started!
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The DevCon5 HTML5 Conference April 2012 Trek Diary
By Jeff Fulton Steve and I were asked to speak at DevCon5 again this last week. We did two sessions on the HTML5 Canvas. At the same time, we are working on a second edition of our O’Reilly HTML5 Canvas Book. We were able to pull content from the…
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