Thursday, June 26, 2008

Maybe the violent video games had an effect...

Having spent the last few days playing with Sharendipity I have a number of comments. The first relates directly to some of the other comments posted on the blog, namely issues with existing games and the interface. There were a number of interesting games I wanted to explore, such as the "Gravity Ball" within the physics section, but was unable to make it work on all occasions. It appears that, despite the fact that Sharendipity uses a Java applet which should be supported across platforms and browsers, some of the controls (specifically those relating to the keyboard) do not all function properly. The only combination which I could make work on a regular basis was IE7 on Windows XP. At this point my blood began to boil...

Which may explain the game concept I attempted to develop. I really enjoyed the "Hunting Season" game ("I can't believe you shot Santa!") and was really interested in the "Facebook Fishbowl", where images of your friends on facebook populate the screen and move about randomly (it's also supposed to display their status, but that didn't work for me). I'm guessing you can see where this is going... I decided to attempt to combine these into a "Friend Hunter", allowing you to take out your frustrations and disagreements in a safe, online environment (ie. catharsis).

Unfortunately, or fortunately if you are one of my facebook friends, this is where the plan fell through. Though I was able to locate the function which imports friend pictures, I was unable to make sense of it for two reasons: 1) I could not have the help documentation (or any other internet window) open in conjunction with the editing space and 2) I was unable to resize the editing space in order to see all of the code at once. I will admit that this failure may also have to do with my overambitious idea, but given that it should have required no additional coding, consisting soley of gobbing together existing functions....

Regardless, I do recomend trying out the "Hunting Season" game, and will continue to play with and explore the possibilities offered by the Sharendipity platform.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to help with your app... web services are tricky to use, but I think if I get you past that, we can learn more from your experience and you can build the game you want.

Let me know.