A week or so before July 23, 2011, my friend Eric Bacus and I decided we wanted to try and make a game over a one week period. We didn’t know what, but we knew we wanted it to be a “Side-scroller”, with old-school-ish graphics. We also knew it was our friend Corey’s birthday in about a week. Which was perfect, because we only wanted one week to build this. For Corey’s Birthday, we were all going to meet up at an “All you can eat” Crab Legs buffet. So, why not make a game about our friend Corey eating crabs. We went with the idea and began production. I was in charge of code development and Eric was in charge of graphics and animations.

While Eric was figuring out the graphics, I started building the code foundation of the game. HTML5/CSS3 was the “new” thing, so I wanted to test my skills and learn what it would take to build a game in HTML5+CSS3 and Javascript. Since the graphics hadn’t been created yet for our game, I used stand-in graphics pulled from the game “Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island” (one of the best side-scroller games EVER! IMO). After lots of reseaching and using the knowledge I had gained from building games in Adobe Flash. I came up with this Yoshi’s Island Prototype. I even made it iOS/Android/Touch friendly! I was pretty amazed at how responsive CSS3 was on mobile devices. I had originally though about using HTML5′s canvas for the motion, but found it to run like crap on a mobile device. So CSS3 was the winner! Building that prototype had taken a day or two of time. By that time, Eric had some of the graphics built, so I moved on with taking what I had, and began building Corey’s Crab game.

We had the original idea of gameplay just being that you jumped on crabs heads, and they died… But we still didn’t know a good way for Corey to “eat” the crab, and we wanted to make the game have another level of difficulty. So, we added the ability to “eat” the crab after it was “dead”, by standing over it and tapping Down Arrow to “munch” the crab till it was totally devoured. After many days of adding features, bug fixing, and lots of testing. We barely made the deadline… Granted, there are still lots of bugs present, and it’s only really been tested in the Chrome Browser. Playing it on an iPad or Android is still kind of broken too… BUT, having made a playable HTML5+CSS3 game in 1 week was good enough for me. I’d still like to go back and flush out the bugs, and get it tested in all browsers. Maybe someday I will find the time… Till then, try playing Corey’s CrayzCrabz game!

Play CrayzCrabz! (v0.5 beta)
Play Yoshi’s Island Prototype

PS: The game’s title was a mash up of Corey’s alias CrayzBeatz and Crazy Crabs.

Propaganda3 is celebrating 10 years of business this year. So P3 thought it would celebrate by taking a look back at the last ten years. Head over to ten.propaganda3.com and interactively find important global events over the last decade. P3 rounded up as many events as they could dig up. Every event has a brief description pulled from Wikipedia, and displays an array of images pulled live from Google Image Search. Some events will even pull your Facebook Wall posts from around the time of the event (if you give it permission). Hope you enjoy the experience!

Big thanks to Cello and everyone at Propaganda3 for making this project possible. Had a lot of fun helping work on it.

It’s been an extremely busy year… Firstly, I joined a start-up company called Menufy. We provide restaurants with an easy to use website that handles online ordering for both take-out and delivery orders. For more detailed info check out our site Menufy.com.

Here’s a simple description from the site.

Menufy partners with restaurants to provide online food ordering capabilities.

We develop e-commerce software and custom websites for restaurants that enable customers to digitally and interactively browse a food menu, to place take-out or delivery orders, and to pay online by credit card via our secure payment processor.

Websites are customized around your brand identity and pointed to your domain name or to a menufy.com subdomain. No monthly contracts and no pesky ads.

If your a restaurant owner looking to make yourself available online. Get in contact with us at sales@menufy.com.

I’m an Android fanboy, I started out with a Nexus One, then the T-Mobile G2, and now I own the MyTouch 4G Slide. After almost a year or two of using Android, I want to share what I have found. So, here are some of my favorite Android apps…

Dansl’s Favorite Android Apps

*Last Updated: Oct 1, 2011*

System Upgrades:

File Sharing:

Utility:

News:

Music/Media:

Social:

Entertainment:

Live Wallpapers:

Widgets:

Rooted Phones Only:

The story starts at The Corporation. A place where websites are sold as templates, and all the employees are mindless drones. You are the rouge who plants the P3 machine, in hopes to overtake The Corporation and free the world from it’s mindlessness. With the help of Viridian Disciple, you must journey to The Corporation’s main server core and reroute the servers. Go now, before all is lost!

http://experience.propaganda3.com

Credits:
Everyone at P3 and Bazillion!

Cameron Calder – Creative Director / Designer
Dan Long – Unity3D Developer / Game Concept
Jeff Longshore – Flash Site Developer
Joe Baehr – Writer / Story Concept / Project Manager
Dave Stewart – Story Concept
Marcelo Vergara – Story Concept
Jeff Beith – Producer / Art Direction
Noel Selders – Sound Design / Music
Marshall Miller – 3D Textures / Modeling / Design / Animation
Robert Grace – 3D Textures / Modeling / Design / Animation
Tyler Keith – 3D Cinemas / Textures / Compositing
Dave Humunczuk – 3D Modeling
Brian Lynus – 3D Modeling / Textures / Cinemas / Animation

Draw(er) is a drawing and sketching app for Android devices. The various tools in Draw(er) give you a new perspective on drawing. So your basic lines, turn into works of art!

The app originally started out as a way for me to learn Java, and the Android SDK, but it has evolved into a semi-port of Ricardo Cabello‘s HTML5 drawing app, Harmony. It’s not exactly a true port, but it shows off the basics and it was a fun learning experience. I hope to keep updating it, and eventually add more to it. Follow me on Twitter for any future updates.

Get Draw(er) for Android
Also available on the Amazon Appstore and the Blackberry Appstore

What are QR Codes?:
A QR code is a lot like a barcode you see on most products. QR codes are a great way to share information like websites and contact info. They can be scanned using your camera equipped device and a proper QR code processing app (For Android, I use the Barcode Scanner App, and on iPhone I use QR Reader for iPhone.) Once the code is scanned and processed, it takes you directly to the URL on your device, or shows you whatever else was encoded in the QR code. I love the ease ability of QR codes, just a quick scan, and the content is on your device. For Example, there is a great plug-in for Google Chrome called QR-Code Tag (For Firefox there’s Mobile Barcode) which lets you generate a QR code for the site you are currently viewing. This is super handy if your reading an article, and need to take it on the go. So, what about reading a QR code from your phone to your desktop computer? Well, surprisingly that wasn’t as easy. I spent some time digging around the internet, and could not find a good cross-platform application for reading QR codes onto your desktop computer. The only thing I found that was somewhat close, was an AS3 library on the Spark Project community page called QRCodeReader. At that time, the only thing using the library was embedded on a web page… which isn’t the most ideal solution if your wanting to just scan something quickly. So, I took the initiative to implement the library into an Adobe AIR app that can be run on basically any system. I call it QRreader. Follow me on twitter for updates.

Note: I have moved all the info and download links for QRreader to http://dansl.net/qrreader

I’ve been an iPhone fan boy since the iPhone came out 3 years ago. The main reason I loved the iPhone, was because you could jailbreak it, totally open it up and take your iPhone to the next level. But, I have always kept my eye out for Android, because I’m a huge fan of the open-source community and love Google. I had doubts about Android because of the hardware… The phones just didn’t compair to the iPhone, and no multi-touch?? Fortunately, everything changed once I saw the Nexus One. It looked a lot like the iphone, and after an update, had native multi-touch! So, I took a leap of faith, and sold my iPhone 3GS. The very next day, I got my Nexus One(N1) and haven’t looked back! I will say that there are a few things about the iPhone I miss… mainly some of the apps. But, what really sold me on the N1, was the fact that I didn’t need to “Jailbreak” it to get the ability to customize, and do what I want with the Android OS on the N1.

The Android OS is just amazing how dynamic it is, everything can be integrated and changed to meet your needs. I think the only thing the iPhone does better then Android, are games. Games on Android, at the moment, are pretty lame compared to the iPhone. Now, all that will probably change as soon as Flash 10.1 is release for Android. Which is another reason for my decision. Abode recently announced that Flash Player 10.1 will run on Android, which means, ALL sites should load on the nexus one, including Flash Games. How well they run depends on how the Flash content was optimized… Plus, with Flash CS5 launching in April you can create native Android Apps, and iPhone apps straight from Flash! So, not only can you run flash from within Android’s browser, but you can also make native apps for it. Where as with the iPhone, your limited to only apps, which is still pretty cool.

I still love the iPhone/iTouch, and all of their apps. Which is why I did go out and pick up an iTouch also.

P3 just launched a little online Holiday toy. The Jingle Generator! You basically just use your keyboard or mouse, and hit the keys to generate sounds. The toy will record your jingle, and from there you can play it back, post it on Twitter or Facebook, or send it to a friend’s email. Huge Thanks to P3 for letting me be a part of the project.

The Jingle Generator! From Propaganda3