Global Nerdy

If things get a little too quiet and boring during the holiday downtime and you’re looking for a game, try Pirates Love Daisies. It’s a “tower defense” style game with cute graphics, great sound and very addictive gameplay, and you can play it in a browser that supports the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript troika (often just referred to as the catch-all “HTML5”), which includes the current beta of Internet Explorer 9. In the game, you set up pirates with different combat skills (pistols, swords, cannons and sponges) in strategic locations to defend your patch of daisies from rates, seagulls, crabs, octopi and their boss, the kraken.

If you’re running Internet Explorer 9 or a very fast computer (like my assigned “Dellasaurus” Precision M6500 – a quad-core I7 machine with 16GB of RAM and a 1GB graphics card), try checking the Enable additional effects for IE9 checkbox – it’ll turn on some additional graphic effects in the game, such as clouds and shadows. They’re not necessary for gameplay, but they do spice it up, and you’re going to need a browser that makes use of the GPU (such as IE9) or serious hardware if you want these effects without bogging down the game.

Here’s Larry Larsen talking about Pirates Love Daisies on Channel 9:

Can’t see the video? You can get Silverlight or download it in the following formats: high-quality WMV, high-quality MP4, regular-quality WMV, regular quality MP4 or MP3 (audio only).

Pirates Love Daisies was the first HTML5 project by Grant Skinner, a Flash developer, and was commissioned by Microsoft, who asked him to build a “best-of-breed” tower defense game using HTML5. He talks about his experience on his blog, which includes this opinion on IE9:

I never thought I’d say this, but Internet Explorer 9 actually looks to be a great browser. It has impressive performance, and seems to be very standards compliant. I would definitely recommend checking it out, you might be surprised.

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Giorgio Sardo also blogged about Pirates Love Daisies. In his post titled Pirates Love Daisies: Lessons Learned, he talks about performance and some things they learned about HTML5 game development along the way, including working with the canvas element, fonts, audio and IE9’s developer tools.

Pirates Love Daisies makes use of the Easel JavaScript library, which “provides a full, hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes to make working with Canvas much easier.” Although it’s still in early alpha, it works well enough for Pirates Love Daisies, which uses it to manage and render the game screen.

And finally, where does Pirates Love Daisies live? In the cloud! It’s hosted on Windows Azure as proof that Azure’s not just for line-of-business-y, ecommerce-y web applications (although it works quite well for them).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Comic Sans is probably one of the most misused fonts out there. Originally intended for the comic book-style speech bubbles for “Clippy” and other assistants in Microsoft Office, it got used first for “fun”, “childlike” documents and signs, and then found its way into far less appropriate venues, including those shown in the photos below:

The Comic Sans Criminal site does a great job telling the story of Comic Sans, where people went terribly, terribly wrong with it, what the appropriate uses for Comic Sans are, and it ends with the Comic Sans Pledge:

Check out Comic Sans Criminal! It’s a beautifully-designed site that makes use of some good HTML5 tricks to turn it into an entertaining and gorgeous slideshow, and if it stops you from using Comic Sans inappropriately (or even better, altogether), so much the better!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Christopher Sessums. Click to see the original.

There’s no time like holiday downtime to go noodle with technologies you’ve been meaning to try out. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from all the parties, family gatherings and the madness and crowds of Boxing-Day-and-beyond shopping. At the same time, I’m not a fan of completely vegging out in front of the TV. My own downtime plans – asides from catching up on some reading (I’m currently digging the the Oishinbo series of cooking manga) and playing the new Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty – include doing some noodling with Azure.

On the whole, Azure is pretty simple to use. As far as coding is concerned, there really aren’t too many differences between having your application run on Azure and having it run on a regular server. Naturally, setup and deployment are a little different, and the Azure team have worked hard on making it as simple as possible, and the latest Azure portal UI is the result. Still, it’s a new technology and new turf for a lot of people, and it’s easy to get lost.

If you’re working with Azure and find yourself “lost in the cloud”, we can help! Are you stuck at some point in the deployment process? Having trouble setting up a SQL Azure database? Don’t know where to start? We can help – email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com and we’ll help you get up and running!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

There’s a Coffee and Code in Calgary on Thursday, December 16th! We’ll be at the Second Cup at 607 8th Avenue SW from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

Join us and talk about Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, the industry in general or anything else you like!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Humble Indie Bundle 2 is the second edition of a collection of indie games that run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Last year, the Humble Indie Bundle features World of Goo and other games; this year, the Humble Indie Bundle contains these DRM-free games:

• Braid
• Cortex Command
• Machinarium
• Osmos
• Revenge of the Titans (a new title, launching exclusively inside the bundle)

Purchased separately, these games would sell for a total of USD$85, but for a limited time, you get to set the price and determine where the money goes! That’s right, you determine how much you spend, and how you divide the money among the developers of the games, the EFF and the Child’s Play charity. Great games for the holidays for great causes!

For more, check out the Humble Indie Bundle 2 trailer:

Get Humble Indie Bundle 2 and play some great indie games (and perhaps even get some inspiration for your own Windows Phone 7 games)!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.