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Arcadia + Game Center for Cordova

It’s been a slow couple of months. A bit of “real life” upheaval (in the form of having to find a new job) has prevented blog updates. I haven’t been completely idle during this time, though, and have been working on a few small projects, two of which I’ll detail here.

The first is a Game Center plugin for Apache Cordova. I wanted to learn how to write a Cordova plugin, and as far as I know, no one else has written a plugin for Game Center. I’m probably the only person who is stupid enough to write such a thing. It’s not a 100% complete implementation, but has support for leaderboards, achievements, and turn-based multiplayer games. To test the plugin out, I wrote a simple reversi game, which will allow users to play via asynchronous multiplayer. The game itself isn’t quite done (I hit a roadblock in that I only had one iOS device to test on), but I’m hoping to get back in and finish it soon.

The other project is a minimalistic <canvas>-based game framework. What started as some experimentation with the canvas tag turned into something more like a full-fledged game framework. I use the term “full-fledged” pretty loosely, of course. It has support for game scenes, shape-based sprites, and particle emitters, and handles keyboard/mouse/touch input. My big source of inspiration was the Flash-based games of developer Kenta Cho. While it’s relatively easy to create a simple 2D game in Flash, a lot of the boilerplate code you might want is missing from JavaScript. This framework might help you out in creating prototypes that can be easily embedded into your website for quick feedback. If you end up wanting to publish the game (on mobile, for example), you can set an option when instantiating the game container that causes the canvas to scale to fit the size of the window, which means you could publish across multiple screen sizes pretty easily. I’m currently experimenting with making a simple dual-stick shooter using the framework.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. Keep programming!

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