Look Ma, No Plug-Ins!
So after my renewed enthusiasm for Flash died suddenly thanks to Apple, I turned my attention to my next game development project. My solitaire games site needed to be rejuvenated. I originally created it in 2002/2003 using Shockwave. It actually used Flash assets, but in the pre-AS3 world I needed Shockwave for speed and versatility. I created a main game engine and sets of rules for each solitaire game.
It worked well for a while, but it was harder to add new rule sets than I thought. And then Shockwave started to die. We went through that year or two when there was really no Shockwave for Macs, at least not Intel Macs with default settings. Then followed a year or two more of Shockwave working poorly on Macs. So I started planning a complete re-write of Just Solitaire in Flash using AS3.
If Flash had remained an app-building option for the iPhone and iPad, I would have continued along that route. But it didn’t, so I began to consider HTML5.
OK, I say “HTML5” but what I really mean is JavaScript. It is just that JavaScript isn’t sexy. It is not taken seriously. But with the recent browser wars forcing each browser to perform better, JavaScript is now quite a fast and reliable scripting language.
And, as it turns out, more than capable of being used for solitaire games.
So I worked for more than a month on creating a whole new solitaire engine in JavaScript. And I love it. The new engine not only works better than the old Shockwave one, but it works in places that neither Shockwave nor Flash do: The iPhone, the iPad, Android devices, Linux Firefox, and so on.
So my first attempt to make a plug-in-less game site is a success. I am still working on it, making it better, but the main site is up and running, better than ever.