I recently started writing about my experience in porting Tongits to the iPhone. So far I’ve already written two introductory posts. I’ll be regularly posting technical articles and tutorials specific to iPhone game development as I progress with the project. For those interested in how I will be pulling this off you can visit iTongits and subscribe to the feed.
Blokt
Phil has just released Blokt, a vastly improved version of his earlier Adobe AIR game Traffic Jam. I particularly liked the effects of the game aside from the gameplay itself. It truly is very polished.
You can play the game online or download and install it on your computer to play even when not connected. The demo features 10 levels but for only $4.99 you can enjoy the whole game with 160 levels.
Become a Fan of Tongits! All you need is a Facebook account and join the Tongits Facebook Community. You can write reviews, upload screenshots of your game and interact with other avid players in the community!
If you’ve been trying to access Tongits during the past 2 to 3 days you might have noticed a 404 error page. I would like to apologize for this inconvenience. I had a minor issue with one of my other websites, a blog aggregator, concerning copyright issues. This led to a complete suspension of my hosting account affecting all my other websites (including Tongits) which do not have anything to do with the issue.
I’m not going to try to defend myself in this post as I have already ceased operating that site and have decided not to run any aggregator sites, this includes all my existing ones (I already put all of them down). The headache is not worth it, and some bloggers don’t really appreciate you syndicating their content and providing them with extra traffic. My only opinion in this matter is, if they don’t want their posts to be syndicated then they should simply not make their RSS feed public.
I learned a few things from this experience. First, choose a more considerate host next time that really has their paying customers’ interests first in mind. A host should give a chance to their customer to be able to respond to the issue instead of abruptly suspending their account without any warning, considering the issue raised was too minor and insignifcant to cause such a major headache. I incurred both financial and emotional distress because of this unsound action by my webhost and it wasted both our time to send and respond to support tickets. This could have been easily prevented if only my host acted a bit more considerate instead of being brash about the issue. Someone has totally forgotten about due process. What if it (the complaint) did not really come from the source it claimed and was just cooked up by someone else as a prank?
Second, if you have a critical website, make sure you have a separate host account for it and use that account only for that critical website. Don’t put up other websites and use the same account because if that account gets suspended, all the websites in that account including your critical site will go down.
However everything is back to normal now. I just hope something like this never happens again. I welcome you all back to the site!
Actually it’s not something new. I just redirected my old unused domain ricozuniga.com to my old Adobe Flex blog Rico on Flex. This required me to pay an additional $10 (per year) to Wordpress but that’s fine. I also changed the theme from Light to K2 after more than a year and switched the focus of the blog from Flex related-only to PureMVC framework. I really like the new theme, it’s simple but very elegant and looks very professional.
My surname is actually Zuñiga and not Zuniga. Unfortunately I’m not able to register a domain with a special character. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to do that, but who wants to type in alt+164 just to access the site? Unless you have a spanish keyboard with built in ñ on it.
And as for Tongits. I haven’t updated it for a while and I haven’t touched the code. I’ve been pretty busy with my new (very demanding) job as a senior developer working on Flex projects. I still have plans though to work on some improvements for the game as well as immediately release fixes for critical bugs whenever they’re found.
Also some local gaming industry execs are expressing interest on the game but it’s still too early for something definite. We’re still on the “brainstorming” phase. I’ll update you guys whenever something good comes out of it.
I hope you guys are still enjoying the game as I have enjoyed creating it.
I just became a PayPal verified member. This will surely improve customer confidence in purchasing a license key for the game. Hope this helps the sales figures which is kinda dwindling lately.
Phil of The Air Games (formerly Adobe Air Games) has released their own Adobe® Air™ game, Traffic Jam. Traffic Jam is a simple but very challenging puzzle game. Your goal is to move around the other vehicles to free your own (red) car from the traffic jam. I finished the game’s 40 levels in 279 minutes while doing other stuff (alt+tabbing). I loved the game and would like to see more levels to solve in the future.
Update:
Re-played the game without alt+tabbing (closed the game instead to freeze the timer). Finished all 40 levels in 99 minutes. Well I did it once already so it was easier the 2nd time.
Congratulations to Carlos Nazareno and his team for winning Playyoo’s recent Flash Lite Game Development Contest! Their game, UFO Catcher: Barnyard Abduction, won in the Asia Pacific region.
Naz and his team (Team Fuchikoma) also won the recent Pinoy Indie Games Competition sponsored by Intel and GDAP, they each brought home core 2 quad PCs!
I asked Lavern of Pinoytek.net if he would like to do a short review of Tongits. He has this to say about the game:
When i received notice from Rico about Tong-its, i started to play it many times - many many times. I can’t remember the last time i played Tong-its, but when Rico’s own version came out, i feel i am bringing back the memories again. It’s really addicting!
My final say, Rico’s version of Filipino’s favorite game Tong-its is something that Filipinos should be proud of.
Thanks Lavern for the nice review! You can read the entire article here.
I am now releasing as freeware the J2ME Tongits mobile game I released back in 2006. I am also going to release the source code as soon as I find it among the pile of backup CDs I have. This game was sold for a brief period and sold a few copies. I had to discontinue it for lack of time to provide support for it and update it to the latest technology. The game will run best on phones with a 176×208 screen resolution. Your phone must have J2ME MIDP version 1.0. Most phones these days support this.
Note that I will not be able to provide any kind of support for this game. I also cannot guarantee that bugs will be fixed and features will be added in the future although I do have some plans for another mobile version of Tongits which will use Flash Lite but there is still no definite time table for this.
To install the game, copy the .jar and .jad files to the “Games” folder of your phone and run the “Install Applications” program of your phone. Installation process may vary for each phone model but this is generally the most common way of performing it.
