Paper Rock Scissors: Day 1

I’m building a Facebook game.

Now, don’t worry, you haven’t lost me to the giant beast, my friends. No, I’m just doing a little project, for fun, to both test and demonstrate a number of technologies. I figured something really simple, like Paper Rock Scissors, would be the perfect target.

I have the game playable in about three hours this morning. I have more work to do. The point of this is to demonstrate a number of technologies I am trying to push as an expertise, because they are all things we know well and which I think are ready to have their day in the sun, so I can see a lot of need for this coming in. Even such a simple game is demonstrating all of these things.

A comet server to push events to the game client in the browser
HTML5 to build a game UI that is flashy, but without Flash
Housing a web app as a Facebook app, for promotion and integration purposes
Utilizing HTML5 for mobile gaming platforms

Today, I have a playable prototype that matches up players, updates their scores, and manages the games. There isn’t much UI outside of that. It has some problems, but you can play it and have fun. I’m going to tackle each of the things above in a separate post, but for today, this is what we’re starting with and it will look a hell of a lot better when everything is done.

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