Hacking Game

Okay, so I have a name and full idea of my upcoming game, so it's pretty much official that some time the game will be released. Again, it's not going to be called "Fights and Blood". And it's not going to be about living on land as a modern pirate, creating a place to live, and robbing for your stuff. It's going to be way better. It's going to be for nerds.

I have many ideas for the game, some written on paper. Well, I hope this game has a good turnout. I've already started the game. JavaScript powered and HTML5 DOM storage for saving data.

Game about hacking?

So I have officially started my new game. It's about hacking (no, not real hacking). It's going to be the game with a goal that saves your progress.

A basic description of the game is: you create and own an operating system that you want to sell on the market. But you have one thing that you must do, and that is to conquer some other operating systems and reach the highest "level" of the game. Then your operating system is ready to sell on the market. I'm still thinking about some new features, but I wrote down some useful ideas on a notebook and paper.

Please note that the game is designed for Google Chrome. So far I have not tested it in other browsers yet but I will soon. If it works in other browsers, perfect then. It uses HTML5 DOM storage for saving data. It is also powered by JavaScript, as always.

So I'm sitting down at the computer coding my game right now. Thought I should stop by and tell you what I'm up to before going back to work.

Fights and Blood

I wrote a post that my next game would be one of those strategy games that you create armies and fight and all in, but I know what it will be now! It's called Fights and Blood, and it will be a modern strategy game. Just a few of the great features will be in the game:

• Create a place to live and gather a pirate army of fighters and spies.
• Fight and sell to get goods and money.
• The larger the army and the more coins means the stronger you are.
• All in HTML(5), JavaScript, and CSS.
• HTML5 LocalStorage used for storing data.

Please note that this game will be put up online but data stored will not be stored worldwide. Any information that you enter into the game will only be available on that specific computer and browser you used.

Browser comparison?

I have already finished Level 3 in Save the Cave and will start the fourth one ASAP! I'm very excited about it. I'd like to let my readers know that I did the first browser test in Save the Cave with the latest versions of all major browsers except Internet Explorer. Here are the results:

Chrome 12.0.742.112: Perfect
Mozilla Firefox 4.0.1 and 5.0: Perfect
Opera 11.50: Everything but the cursor image works
Apple Safari 5.0.5: No sound, all the other graphics work

I am using Chrome to view my results in Save the Cave, because Chrome is the browser that I always use. Of course, it's going to work perfectly in Chrome.

I am excited that Save the Cave works perfectly in one of the most popular browsers today! Firefox is used by many people and I hope that since Save the Cave so far works in Firefox 5 (it also works in 4 as far as I know), I'll get more people playing it. I mentioned Chrome first because this is a Chrome game, but Firefox... I'm impressed.

And Opera is pretty much perfect, too. It's just that the cursor that I used doesn't work because Opera doesn't support cursor:url. But the sound and all graphics work perfectly in Opera.

Safari doesn't support playing "OGG Vorbis" files in HTML5, but that's really okay. It's mainly a Chrome game. Maybe sometime I'll make it compatible with Safari right now.

So there you have it!

Save the Cave

The game is Save the Cave. I'm working on it currently, and started it May 8th, 2011. We'll see what date it'll be when I finish it! So, what's the game about? I'll write a quick description below:

Food is low in the cave, which is a crisis. But when some bats bring back some eggs near the cave, that starts some excitement.

One bat has volunteered to go out and gather eggs. You control that bat and he tries to gather eggs and bring them back to the cave without getting killed.

There will be a good amount of levels for you to play. When it's released, you won't want to miss out on the fun! Save the Cave will feature a few challenges with a few levels in them, and you'll have to steal eggs from killdeer nests, frogs, and other animals that aren't mammals. You'll want to stay out of sight or the game is over.

I haven't done very much, but I am excited. The game will be powered by JavaScript, and all of the objects will be divs. No flash, no animated gifs. There will be HTML5 audio.

A review on HTML5

I have decided to write a review on HTML5. I wrote one on Google Chrome (11).

HTML5 reduces the need for validation with scripting. It also released new input types like "email", "url", and many other cool input types. iOS recognizes some of the input types in HTML5. For example, iOS (iPhone or iPad) will display a keyboard with a ".com" key on it when typing in a "url" input. Cool, eh?

HTML5 reduces coding lines greatly besides giving up the scripting. The "progress" element, for example, displays a progress bar, in which you can show a page a loading bar on something like a game loading, or other types of things (like stats).

Many other useful tags have come with HTML5. So far, most browsers do not know how to handle them yet, but we'll get there.

HTML5 introduced "geolocation", "localStorage", and "sessionStorage". I have not used geolocation before, but I do know what it does (tries to find your location). localStorage/sessionStorage is very useful for the same purpose as cookies, except for more features:

• localStorage stores the data with no time limit.
• localStorage/sessionStorage is stored on the client.
• localStorage/sessionStorage stores up to 5MB of data currently (that's actually not bad).
• And possibly more.

We may see lots of cool things when HTML5 is a recommendation. Already, countless HTML5 "canvas" games have been made and are working in most major browsers today.

Overall, HTML5 is a hit.

Tip of the Day

I actually have never tested this, but I don't see any reason for it not to work.

You may start using HTML5 audio/video. I'll tell you why.

HTML5 audio/video allows you to insert text in between the start and end tags to show older browsers that they do not support the element. And the deprecated "embed" tag can actually become useful as a fallback.

Here's the coding:

<audio controls="controls">
<source src="yoursongtitle.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<source src="yoursongtitle.mp3" type="audio/mp3">
<embed src="yoursongtitle.mp3"><embed>
</audio>

Try it out in an older browser that doesn't support any HTML5 or doesn't support the audio or video element. Use your own song for it. Try it out in as many browsers/versions as you can. Tell me how it turned out. Try it out with the "video" element, too. (When doing video, replace the extension "mp3" with "mp4".) Remember that certain browsers need certain plugins available for the "embed" element, but with the "audio" and "video" element, there's no worrying about it.

A good tip for media.

Tip of the Day

For the future, remember something.

When HTML5 is completely finished and most people are using HTML5-supporting versions of browsers, you'll want to completely study HTML5 validation, because it'll be easier than JavaScript.

Go ahead and try it in something like Opera 11. W3Schools has a tutorial on it here.

Just a tip. To give you a heads up on some easiness in coding. Hopefully useful.

Tip of the Day

How do you create a simple addition calculator?

Did I warn you against switching completely over to HTML5? Yes. But I did say that you can use the simple HTML5 "doctype" declaration <!DOCTYPE html> awhile.
But do you want to create a simple addition calculator? HTML5 has the answer! Make a really simple calculator with a tiny bit of script and some HTML(5). Check out W3Schools's tutorial at http://w3schools.com/html5/tag_output.asp to learn how.

Just a tip. And hopefully useful.