Categories
Competitions Java4k

Java4k 2009 Results

The results are up for the 2009 4k competition, with my NiGHTS 4k entry coming a rather satisfying 11th! W00t!

Unsurprisingly (and deservingly) Left 4k Dead takes the top spot, and the worryingly addictive Bridge4k second. In fact pretty much all of the top games are worth playing, there’s a surprising amount of content shoe horned into some of the games.

Categories
Competitions Java4k

NiGHTS 4k on Kotaku!

Kotaku put up an entry about the 2009 4k competition closing and mentioned NiGHTS 4k as one of the ones to check out. Woot!

The judging should be finished anytime soon, and while I don’t expect NiGHTS 4k to be in the top games (the quality bar has been very high this year) I’m interested in hearing the comments and seeing the final standings. Plus I’ve only played a handful of the entries properly so I’ll find out which good ones I’ve missed.

Categories
Competitions Development Games Java4k

New year, new theme, new game!

Since it’s the new year (yes, I’m a little slow catching up with things) I’ve been giving the site a bit of an overhaul. I was never really happy with the old theme, due to it being very dark narrow, making it a bit awkward to read on certain monitors and. It was also pretty restrictive in terms of what I could put on the individual pages due to the side navigation bar always being required.

So I’ve spent the last week working on this new theme and it’s pretty much done now. It’s much lighter and less bunched up which makes it much easier to read (particularly for large chunks of text) and because the primary navigation is the strip of tabs across the top I can have pages which ditch the side navigation if I want to have a really wide page.

There’s new content up too, a game called NiGHTS 4k, so check that out when you’ve got a moment. Applets are much more solid these days so I may try a few more applet games as tests, particularly as the new theme means I can embed decent sized applets without breaking the layout.

One minor note about the new theme – it’s been tested on the latest versions of Opera, Firefox and Chrome, as well as IE7. Safari hasn’t been tested (because I don’t have that handy) but since Chrome is based on the same renderer it should be identical. IE6 manages to make a complete pig’s ear of it, despite claiming to render it in “standards” mode. Frankly I don’t fancy spending a week fighting with IE6’s bugs because I shouldn’t have to.

Those twelve people reading this site who are still on IE6 will just have to bite the bullet and get a proper browser – or upgrade to IE7 :-).