Hybrid Platform. HTML5 and Flash Games.

2013 saw the birth of the “Hybrid Game Platform”. This platform is basically a compatibility layer written simultaneously in Flash and Javascript.

This means, you can write game code once and export as Flash and HTML5. Now this may seem unimpressive, as adobe claims the same thing with createJS. But the fact is, that there needs to be a lot of conversion, before your game works again.

With the Hybrid platform we are talking the same language in both cases. The main advantage of this is, your choice of platform is now a lot wider.

Mobile platforms have a very limited support for Flash, but older browsers don't support HTML5.

The Hybrid platform analyses the browsers capabilities and chooses the right techniques to display.

This is best practice anyway, but used to mean, you had two versions of the software that had to be written.

And if you change anything (like texts, logo's etc) you have to change it twice. This lead to more cost.

With the deployment of the hybrid platform, this cost is literally cut in half, because you only have to do everything once.

Also, by keeping Flash as an option, you can then convert the Flash-apps to Mobile Apps quite easily.

All round flexibility for a very low price.

The Hybride Platform has been succesfully deployed for three different clients in 2013.

(Sinterklaasjournaal (just HTML5, no flash fallback), AanZee vakantiehuizen, VillaXL).

I will add links when these go live 15th of  januari 2014!

Hybrid Site Platform

I'm now working on a similar platform for sites.

Debugging html5 games

Debugging games can be VERY annoying.
Especially if you have to debug android 2.2 for instance.
You are on a mobile device, without debug messages.
Android provides remote debugging, but not for really old browsers or all phones.

What to do?

Well the easiest way I could come up with was create my own debug-console in javascript.

Here is a jsFiddle:
http://jsfiddle.net/GfmxT/3/

In Chrome it works fine, but I checked on Android this morning and found there was no scrolling (even though scroll is on auto), and on IE and firefox it doesn't scroll down automatically! But you can use the scrollbars. I've been fiddling on the iPad and saw I needed a function to stop the autoscroll so you can swipe-scroll through the debug statements.

So there IS more than meets the eye to this simple concept.
I allready had some great experiences with clients testing and copying information from the debug console to communicate an error. That's a lot better than a bug report saying: "It doesn't work on...".
Now I often don't even have to reproduce the error to be able to fix it.

It's only too bad that the real error messages don't come through like they do on the desktop console. But I think there is a jQuery function to do (part) of that as well. So I'll be updating this soon.