Mr Speaker

Category: HTML5

A most useful function

Hot on the heels of my web colors rant, comes this amazing piece of Emacs Lisp I now have in my init file: (defun web-color () (interactive) (let ((cols ‘(“AliceBlue” “AntiqueWhite” “Aqua” “Aquamarine” “Azure” “Beige” “Bisque” “Black” “BlanchedAlmond” “Blue” “BlueViolet” “Brown” “BurlyWood” “CadetBlue” “Chartreuse” “Chocolate” “Coral” “CornflowerBlue” “Cornsilk” “Crimson” “Cyan” “DarkBlue” “DarkCyan” “DarkGoldenRod” “DarkGray” “DarkGreen” […]

Farm to Table: A postmortem

You have 48 hours of adventuring time in a country you’ve *never* been to, and *may never* return. By random chance, There is a 48 hour game jam happening simultaneously. A sacrifice must be made: the game or the experience? Choose wisely. … Trick question! You can do both, poorly! Welcome to my Ludum Dare […]

Oculus Rift Reddit Internet Explorer

Recently both Firefox and Chrome released VR-enabled version of their browsers. Just as Lawnmower Man predicted. I decided to test them out with the Rift, by hacking together “Mr Speaker’s Internet Explorer” (or the repo): It loads any ImgUr images in a sub, and finds related subs mentioned in the “about” info.

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 […]

Weird EventSource problems? Watch your content-length!

Super short version: If you’re using Server Sent Events, and it doesn’t work in Firefox because “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at…” and it’s not a CORS problem… make sure you’re not setting a content-length header. The end.

Colourising sprites in Canvas – part 2

And we’re back! In part one we looked at setting up a tinted palette for drawing our 8-bit masterpieces to canvas. Here’s what we’re going for today: rendering colourised sprites and tiles. We’ll be loading in the 4-color sprite sheet and rendering tiles from it with our chosen colours.

Navigate the web with your gamepad

How crap is the mouse, right? Yeah, I know! So I made a greasemonkey script to do my websurfin’ using my NES-style USB gamepad. For those of you too excited to read on, take your gamepad-enabled build of Firefox and install Gamepad Navigator now! Up and down to scroll the page up and down. The […]

Code like that

“Bit of advice: if you want a role model, pick an old guy. By the time you grow up, they’re dead” – Bob’s Burgers Six hundred games: invented, designed, and coded – in 2 days. That was the Lundum Dare game competition #21, held from the 19th to the 22nd of August. Hoards of game […]

Semantic game making

HTML5 means one thing, and one thing only: games! Okay, that’s not true at all. Not even close, but heck – we are seeing stacks of fantastic games emerge, and the buzz that surrounds even the more mediocre efforts is considerable. So where’s the love in the HTML5 spec for us game makers? When it […]