the gaming project

Over the past few weeks we've been working on a web project that collects a organizes all of the visual depictions of World War 2 and lists them on a timeline.

Using Handlebars.js, the site grabs JSON data from a Google Sheet and generates entries for the timeline. The page itself is styled using Bootstrap and jQuery, both of which provided invaluable resources for the unique needs of this type of website.

The site continues to be in a beta state while we make more improvements and get more entries, but you can see our progress @ http://zion.tgp.io/staging/ww2

Hi. I guess I should introduce myself, I am named Nik. I write code and work on gaming projects. Lately, I'm really into Unity when doing gamedev. I work with javascript for my day job, so naturally I started to play with Node.js as well. When I'm not writing code, I might be playing pinball or riding bikes.

We have many projects being worked on in the tgp game factory. About a month ago, we jammed a Ludum Dare Entry, Planet Kung Fu, and according to results, others thought it was fun and humourous. Plane Kung Fu (PKF) was built for the web using Unity Web Player (I'm very excited for Unity 5 WebGL). We decided we'll pursue this further by adding more content and releasing it on the mobile app stores.

I added some basic touch controls using TouchScript (Putin looks impressed). This library was quick and easy to implement into the Unity project for PKF. It needs more tuning, but it was instantly kung fu fury fun. No promises, but I think spring 2015 is good guess. I want to do something unrelated for Proc Jam too.

On the side, is a long term project that I've been very slowly developing aptly codenamed Mule. I think the best short description for it is an "Asynchronous Turn-Based Game Platform". (The previous description was "Abstract Asynchronous Strategy Server" aka AASS, or ass). I needed the technology to build another bigger strategy game that I won't be working on for a few years and I'll have a basic writeup about it soon. Currently, I'm working on an implementation of Backgammon using Mule as the backend server and my goto canvas library EaselJS for clientside. It's currently fully functional, and I'm working on all the UI/UX features to make it fun to play. All the art is done and looks great. So there might be some sort of Backgammon lobby on our site sometime soon… unfortunately the current Mule frontend needs polish so there won't be a production read (see staging server).