Latest Posts

  • Two of our HTML5 games for the NFL Rush Zone site are out

    We’re pleased to announce that 2 of the games we built for the new NFL Rush Zone site are out. The site was designed and built by Brandissimo! and has been a key destination for American football loving kids since 2007. But due to increasing mobile traffic they built a mobile browser experience to coincide with the desktop one.

    Part of this revamp included porting some of their much loved Flash games over to HTML5. We were pleased to have been asked to handle the ports of the games Galactic Rusherz and Jump Duck. As with all our games they were built for both mobile and tablet scale, and offer small slices of quick action fun.

    Play them both at http://nflrz.nflrush.com/games – make sure you use a mobile browser or it’ll redirect you to the desktop site.

  • Our HTML5 game for McCoy’s Crisps is out

    We’re very pleased to announce that today saw the start of the McCoy’s “Darts Pro’s at your pub” campaign. McCoy’s are a very popular brand of crisp (potato chip) in the UK. This on-pack campaign allows players to challenge a virtual darts professional to a single or triple throw contest. Winners get entered into the draw to win Xbox 360s and other prizes.

    The web side of the campaign was run by local agency Activation Digital who contracted us to build the game. Over 50 million packets of crisps have been printed with the QR code and URL on them, so if you fancy a bag of cheese and onion be sure to look out for it 🙂

    Read more about our build process and play the game here.

  • Solving black screens and corrupted graphics in HTML5 games on the Samsung S3

    This is pretty much how I felt over the past few days debugging this

    One thing we always try to do as HTML5 game developers is maximise performance. This isn’t an easy task as pretty much every handset is fighting against you when it comes to draw speeds and available RAM in the browser. So when I ordered a Samsung Galaxy S III – quite literally the pinnacle of the Samsung device range at the moment, I wasn’t expecting its beast-like technical specifications to give me any problems at all. Oh how wrong I was.

    For some reason several of our games were either turning entirely black or parts of them were not displaying at all. They didn’t crash, there was no error log entry to look at, they just didn’t actually display. The game was still running however, sounds could be heard and touch events were still received – so if you knew where to touch you could still play it, it just wasn’t rendering anything. What followed was a full day and sleepless night spent debugging to find the solution. It was such a task I had to share it here to help fellow devs!

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  • New RGCD Logo

    If somehow you’re not already familiar with RGCD, you should be. Now even cooler with a brand new logo by yours truly.

  • Our new 8-bit inspired HTML5 game: Droplets

    The problem with working so hard on a framework and client projects, is that you have precious little time left for your own games. I felt the need to correct this. So I spent a day converting one of our Flash games to HTML5:

    Droplets is a simple little game based on the range of vinyl toys created by Jam Factory. Just get the 5 droplets home, collect as many hearts as you can on the way, and avoid contact with pretty much everything else! The mobile version differs from the Flash one in that you slide left/right and have a lot of bounce – if you aren’t too careful you can end up ricocheting around the place like a pinball. Get home to the factory at the end to complete the level.

    Simple, but still quite fun 🙂 And I’m very happy with the way it resizes intelligently on most devices. I’ve tested it on a variety of phones and tablets, from an iPhone 3 up to a Nexus 7, and it ran ok on most of them. Some (like the Samsung Galaxy S3) don’t cope with the canvas scaling too well and thus the frame rate suffers, but on the whole it’s about all that the ImpactJS engine can handle.

    Point your mobile browser at http://gametest.mobi/droplets/ to play. And if by some fluke you’re a portal looking to license it, drop me a line.

More posts to tickle your grey matter ...