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Four HTML5 Canvas Game Demos Running Full Screen On An iPad 2 (video)
By Jeff Fulton [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/2hNU9uBU37I” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Four HTML5 Canvas games with touch controls running from our web site as full screen apps on an iPad 2. Notice the smooth performance in Mobile Safari. These also run on the Kindle Fire web browser with similar performance. Music: “Short…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Semi Finalist Announcement Postponed A Week
According to Pocket Gamer, Atari is overwhelmed with entries (87 in all) so they are delaying the announcement of the semi-finalists until May 1st. This gives me an extra week to formulate bizarre Atari dreams and worry myself sick before we hear the news. With 87 ideas floating…
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Death, Disappointment And Pong Dreams : The Atari Pong Developer Challenge Is Getting Into My Head
Tomorrow, Atari announces the semi-finalists in their Pong Developer Challenge. I had planned to create a demo for the contest, but instead, got sucked into writing a design document that took me the better part of a week, and the demo never materialized. I felt really good about it,…
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See You At DevCon5, Santa Clara!
Jeff and I are very excited to be speaking again at DevCon5 Santa Clara, next week. We will be speaking at two sessions the morning of Thursday the 26th. We have been busy for the past few days completely revamping our presentation from last December so we can focus on…
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Don’t Miss Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast
I just found out about this today: Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast from the guys over at Lost Decade Games. They have been creating podcasts since last November, and so far they are really good! You should go check them out.
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Amazing Atari Research Images From 1982 That Predicted The Future
By Steve Fulton In 1982, during the halcyon days of the original Atari, Bob Stein worked with pioneering computer scientist Alan Kaye in the Atari Advanced Research Labs. One of their projects was to imagine the future of encyclopedias. In a set of incredible images from 30 years…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge: Challenge Met! How About you?
I worked all weekend on our submission for the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and just submitted it a few minutes ago Even though there were complaints from some people about the terms and conditions for the contest, ultimately we decided it would be a fun and challenging project to tackle.…
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Atari Poetry: Snack Time Is Over
Snack Time Is Over “Hey, that’s cool! ColecoVision looks radical!” Alex said. I held the magazine with both hands, scanning every word on the pages Greg and Alex looked over my shoulders “What’s the 5200?” Alex asked, pointing at the next page “It’s Atari’s new system. It’s supposed to kick…
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Web/Mobile/Mobile Web Game Development Survey : Hype vs. Reality : Help Us Sort It Out
By Steve Fulton [iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHE0VkNLd1NZV0F4OUxINWhWbGhna1E6MQ” width=”665″ height=”2000″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″]Loading…[/iframe]
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8bitrocket.com Podcast : Jack Tramiel And Atari
by Jeff Fulton Finally, a new podcast! Today we tackle Jack Tramiel and The Atari ST. Listen Here.
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R.I.P. : Commodore Legend Jack Tramiel
According to Forbes, Jack Tramiel has died at the age of 83. Most Atari fans know Jack as the founder of Commodore who skillfully outwitted the first video game company in the early 80’s by beating the pants off the Atari computer division with the low-priced Vic-20 and C-64.…
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8bitrocket.com April 2012 HTML5 Game Development Poll Results Infographic (updated)
By Jeff Fulton Our HTML5 Game Development Poll Results are in! With had a huge response, so thank you very much. The poll confirms to us that more and more new developers are planning to use HTML5 this year and that the HTML5 Canvas and related technologies are the…
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Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition #2
ASV Interwebs, Go! (I’m already starting to see why you stopped doing this every week) Abobo – http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/587787 – A gargantuan NES tribute parody with classic NewGroundsian sarcasm, hyperbole and violence. Abobo is supposedly an NES character who was never allowed to exist because he was too violent and ridiculous.…
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The best of 8bitrocket Track Back Spam
We get A LOT of “Trackback Spam” that comes in the form of emails to our admin account. These are supposed legitimate requests for us to post “track-backs” to sites that are linking to our posts. I figured it might be fun to post best ones for you to read.…
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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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Adobe Working With CreateJS (Grant Skinner) To Let Flash CS6.0 Export To HTML5 Canvas
By Steve Fulton We found out about Grant Skinner’s CreateJS project a few weeks ago, and were instantly excited to start writing about it for the second edition of HTML5 Canvas. The libraries he is helping to create will go a long way to help make Canvas development…
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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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Adobe To Charge Developers Per Centimeter Of ActionScript Code
Coming on the heels of Adobe’s Premium Features for Flash (developers will be required to pay Adobe 9% of revenue above $50,000 if they use certain high-tech features), comes a new, upcoming feature for Adobe flash CS6.0 : Metered Usage For ActionScript. Announced today, Adobe will start charging developers per…
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Google 8-bit Quest Maps For April Fools Are So Awesome I Want Them To Stay Forever
Google’s April Fools “joke” this year is an 8-bit looking map style for Google Maps. Not only does it look great, but I could so easily see myself traveling around on these things, killing monsters on my quest to be the Avatar. In fact, Google should hire Lord British…
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Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition
I have been meaning to start these up again and cover the world of games, retro, etc, but time has not been on my side. Ace SV is filling the gap though and sent this over today. Dragon Age – but in Flash with hexagons. If you’ve played or seen…
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Flash Premium Features: Adobe Wants Some “Zynga Money”, But Probably Not Yours
By Steve Fulton Adobe announced yesterday a set of “Premium Features” for Flash. These are features that, when used for web games, will require a license fee after a certain threshold of revenue has been reached (currently $50K) After that, they want their “tribute” in the form of a slice…
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Support The Concept Of Indie Game Development : Buy Shay Pierce’s Connectrode For iOS
By Jeff Fulton Shay Pierce had a solid job working for OMGPOP up until last week. Then a large social game outfit bought the company so they could get access to OMGPOP’s top-selling game, Draw Something. Pierce was not working on Draw Something, but he had the option…
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HTML5 Game Development Survey
[iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHlOeG9temNETl8xRUloTkw3SlVqMkE6MQ” width=”760″ height=”1200″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″]Loading…[/iframe]
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FlashFireBug Rocks The His-house!
Last year when I was doing Facebook game development (and hating life) for a large, monstrous gaming company, we had a lot of trouble getting the Firefox Flash plug-in for FireBug to work correctly and show internal trace’s exceptions, etc. So, I never used it. This last Friday,…
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Journey Out Of An Abyss: How My Rejected Cracked.com Photoplasty Images About Classic Video Games Changed My Life
Last year I joined the cracked.com forums. Cracked.com is one of the best humor sites on the interban, and what’s really cool about the site is that they allow nearly anyone to join their author forums, and try to develop content for the site. There is no guarantee that…
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Ace The Super Villain Comes Out Strong With “FireArm”
Another day, and another encouraging sign of things getting back on track. Ace The Super Villain , One of our best and longest running readers has just finished a new game named “FireArm”, an impressive beat-em-up style game in Flash. You Can see it below. [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/R1eotggajX8″…
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Rush Hour Plus! Yes, Good Flash Shooters On The Web Are Still Being Produced!
We were just sent a link to this from our friends over at Sokay.net (Chris Rock and Bryson Whiteman)! Rush Hour Plus is a classic, pixelated shooter with power-ups and insane blasting action. The game made me happy today, which is no mean feat. Click below to play:…
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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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Coming Back From The Dead…
We had a near total failure of the site last night. However, we were able to export all the old content, and get everything back up this morning. We will be searching fr new themes and logos and stuff to make this a (albeit forced) fresh start. Any ideas…
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Richard Davey Speaks About The Reality of HTML5 Game Development
By Jeff Fulton Pro Flash game development veteran Richard Davey has a great article named “The Reality of HTML5 Game Development and making money from it” that you NEED to read right now. It’s an awesome overview of the an industry that is blowing up right now written by a…
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Emergent Game Play In Classic Games
A few weeks ago on one of the forums I frequent, a fellow retro game fan (Rimbo) talked about playing “Time Pilot:Pacifist”. This was not a new game, but rather, a different way of playing an old game. In his version of Time Pilot, he chose to never fire a…
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Ansca Corona Cross Platform Mobile Development: The Good, the Kind of Bad, and the Not So Ugly
By Jeff Fulton Ansca Corona For Cross-platform development At Producto Studios, we have just finished a large 5 month cross-platform (iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Android Tablet) project using Ansca Corona as the API and tool kit. Corona is not a drag and drop style app builder, but a robust, subscription-based API…
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Top 10 “Other” Ways To Punish A Laptop Computer (Besides Shooting It 8 Times) (Video)
By Steve Fulton [iframe width=”550″ height=”440″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/OugrYsr7pOA” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] A few weeks ago we saw a video of a guy punishing a Windows laptop by shooting it with 8 hallow point bullets. Now while we are all for punishing Windows laptops (they certainly punish us all day long), we think…
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Stuck trying to think of a mobile game idea? Try App-o-Tron.
By Jeff Fulton If you are stuck spinning your wheels, trying to think of the next “Angry Birds”, “Fruit Ninja”, or “Plants v. Zombies”, why not try the App-o-Tron mobile game idea generator. It couldn’t hurt and probably will come up with better ideas than 90% of the current games in…
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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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