Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
Golingo: a great Titanium mobile Web game, open sourced for you
Category: Appcelerator, Examples
, Games
Jacob Waller created an addictive word came in Golingo. What sets it apart?
- Not a single line of Objective-C written, courtesy of Titanium Mobile
- Only one (!) image ingame – the rest is CSS3 magic
- Fluid gameplay thanks to CSS Transitions and Animations
- All logic using pure, beautiful JavaScript
- Multitouch draggables using iPhone Touch API
- Logic encapsulated using Low Pro – meaning split screen mode was easy pie
- jQuery 1.4.2 for development speed (and sanity of developer)
- CouchDB as highscore storage, with storage logic in JavaScript
- Predictable randomness means replayable games, all courtesy of excellent seedrandom
Jacob dives into deeper into the full tool chain that he used in his post about open sourcing the code behind the game. That’s right, he wants you to fork it and do something amazing with the game. Pretty awesome if you ask me.
His tool chain:
- Titanium Mobile
- CSS3 with Webkit extras
- jQuery 1.4.2
- Low Pro for jQuery
- Glyphish icons
- Uri-parser
- Swedish word list
- CouchDB
- Flag icons
He then goes on to talk about the initial construction of the game:
Most of the actual game was made in a few weeks time, but from scratch to published app it took almost six weeks of part time work. A lot of this time was spent banging my head into various walls. Again, Titanium is great, but it’s a young framework with all the kinks that follows. There has been quite a few bugs, and the documentation hasn’t always been up to date – but this is much better nowadays. What more – since most other developers are as clueless as yourself, It’s been hard finding good resources and getting help. I did however get a trial for Appcelerator’s Premium Subscription, with 48-hours guaranteed response, and I must say it’s really good stuff. The developers themselves answers all your stupid questions and relieves most of the wall banging. If you can afford it, go for it!
By releasing the code for Golingo, we hope to relieve some of the headaches surrounding developing packaged HTML5 apps. I do not say that it’s not full of faults, because it is, but at least it is a working example full of faults. Please don’t hesitate to dig through the code to see what is going on. We believe we’ve solved some common problems that you too will run in to when using Titanium, for example transparently calling native functions from a webview (and vice versa) using callbacks and trickery. Here’s a quick recap of that:
- Connecting Titanium Contexts
- Low Pro like a low pro: $(‘<div/>’).attachAndReturn(Letter, this, letter, specialLetter);
- Sexifying: including templating with mustasche
Thanks for the great info and resource Jacob!
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