Live editing for game development

Here's a small demo on how I've been using Chrome's "live editing" features to speed up my development workflow. Chrome let's you modify currently loaded files on the fly - so you can tweak settings and test code in real time.

Don't forget to keep an eye on the development of my up-and-coming waterski odyssey: WaterSki or Die! (coming to a phone near you soon, with programmer art removed).

‘mazed

Maze generation has never been easier:

Math.random() < 0.5 ? "/" : "\\";

and you've got yourself a maze! Like all awesome ideas this one comes directly from the Commodore 64.

What you’re missing out on on App.Net

Maybe you've heard that there's a new kid on the short-message scene: App.Net. It's just like Twitter, except you have to pay $50 a year to use it. Sure, that'll keep the poor people away - but what else do you get for the fee? How's this for an incentive: no longer are you limited to the measly 140-character messages tyrannically enforced by Twitter!

You get 256 characters.

For the people who don't need to save their $50 for food and rent and medicine and stuff that's a big 116 extra characters to flaunt! Accordingly, I've created an app to periodically fetch and highlight these extra characters - so the regular folk can see what they're missing out on. I call it...

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Nicer random colours, with HSL

As many of you may know from my complaining, I've currently embarked on a new writing mission: a CoffeeScript book for SitePoint. The example project that runs throughout is an HTML5 game using Canvas. While I was trying to create a random colour palette - for instructional purposes - I fell over this "trick" of using HSL rather than RGB to pick more pleasant-ish colours.

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Caine’s Arcade Fun Pass Generator

Caine's Arcade is the coolest arcade ever (even better than Flynn's Arcade and Bailey's Arcade. The "pros" of Caine's Arcade are that all the games are hand-built by a 9 year old, out of cardboard. But the "cons" are the prices: $1 gets you 4 plays, and $2 gets you a "Fun Pass" (tm) valid for 500 plays.

2 bucks! Phew... You might be thinking you could get around that by making a fake pass of your own - but Caine is way ahead of you. He's added a security check to each Fun Pass, to validate that it's the real deal:
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