Monday, February 22, 2016

A Blast from the past with Sedition.

A few years ago, I published an Android game, mostly as a hobby. I actually fell into making the game, it was originally planned to be a demo for a talk I was considering giving at a conference. The plans few through, but I kept on tinkering with the game. It was also a good source of material for earlier posts on this blog.

The result was Sedition for Android.

About a about ago, I got the crazy idea to port the game to run inside a browser. I have done some work with the Google Web Toolkit in the past, and I've been very impressed with the way in which it can make developing a rich client side application feel like you're developing a traditional desktop application. GWT compiles Java language code into very efficient complied Javascript. With the advent of HTML 5's media support and WebGl, I had everything I needed to take the Android source and port it.

Originally, I called it "Sedition 4 Chrome", since I was planning to make it a Chrome packaged app and put it in the Chrome app market. I may still do that. Writing a Chrome app gives you access to more features that you can do with lowest common denominator general web apps.

It has numerous quirks, and the rendering especially is not quite right in several ways, but that actually matches the last released version of the Android version. I do plan to fix both eventually. Some of the rendering oddities, especially "sprite parallax" are much more noticeable on large screens than the small mobile screens the game used to run on.

I also have a few ideas for the general engine I developed while working on that game that might come in handy for some of my other projects.

It's a fun project to work on, and in part I wanted it to server a sort of a portfolio of what types of applications I can develop.

Play it yourself at

http://anibit.com/sedition/


--P