Naren Salem

My son likes to play some of the casual games on Facebook. I am not a big fan of the ads he ends up watching to play the game. I don’t know if that bothers me more or less than the fact these games are made using flash.

So I figured what if I could make some of these simple games - without ads, and a lot less gaudy.

I started my search for game engines here. This was such a well written article I was ready to believe whatever they were going to say… but I also looked at this comparison tool.

CraftyJS

Best thing about Crafty seems to be its component oriented design. The Build New Games link above describes it well. This might actually be a good place for me to start. Need to compare this with CreateJS.

LimeJS

From the Build New Games review

Lime is a very “safe” choice in that it will for sure be able to handle just about any 2D game you could throw at it. But Lime is also a bit tedious at times, and also sometimes very general. Lime can be seen more as a “game framework” from which you could build specific game engines on top of. One area that Lime really excels is its node graph. Just about everything in Lime derives from the base Node class, and nodes can contain child nodes. This allows you to build complicated entities that can have many children, yet address them from a high level. For example you might add a character node as a child of a vehicle node it is riding in. The character node might also have an armor node that he is wearing. Whenever the parent vehicle node moves, the character and his armor will move right along with it, making them act as a cohesive whole.

MelonJS

Another good looking open source engine, with physics support. Check out this tutorial for creating a space invaders clone. Melon also seems to have more recent activity than some of the others.

ImpactJS

Mainly suited for 2D Platformers and action games. Plus it is not free. So maybe this is not going to be the first engine I try.

CreateJS

It seems like these libraries give you drawing tools, but the interactions have to be provided by the developer. This library may be great for animated websites, I think!

Wild Kratts games with CreateJS - http://pbskids.org/wildkratts/games/

With AngularJS

Not much on details here (which isn’t a bad thing), but a good inspiration for connecting up a game engine with Angular.

https://www.toptal.com/web/making-html5-canvas-based-game-with-angularjs-and-createjs

Not gonna work out

Egret

For the video website I am creating we wanted to add some commenting options. The Facebook Comments plugin works nicely for our needs. It is easy to add. Looks half decent. And the visitors don’t need to create yet another account (if they have Facebook).

But I was running into a problem that when the page was loaded the comment plugin would not show, until I refreshed the page. Turns out there may be a problem with Turbolinks and JavaScript. I found the solution on StackOverflow, but that didn’t have much detail. I will probably run into something else that will provide more insight soon.

Read this on StackOverflow here.

To submit an online course for review with the TEA, we need to comply with a host of requirements. One of them, understandably, relates to accessibility. Their requirement is that we satisfy these two guidelines:

• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA - https://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/
• Federal Law - Section 508 - http://www.section508.gov/

Most of the guidelines and requirements are pretty common sense. Make the site readable, make sure it will work well with screen readers, make sure it won’t cause seizures. That kind of stuff.

There were a couple of online tools that I ran our site on. The cleanest one was http://www.cynthiasays.com/ The good-ish news is that in terms of our content we were flagged for two things.

• Italics
• Missing alt text for images

That’s not too bad. Mainly because we can easily fix these. I am not sure if the TEA will use some tool for their testing or if it will be up to reviewers.

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Unfortunately we got pulled up for some other stuff as well. The testing tools flag some things with the Canvas framework. These are for some of their menu items and hidden elements. These flags range in severity with one or two showing up as ‘must fix’.

Canvas has a forum post that brags about how their site is designed for accessibility. I wonder what they have to say about the things that were detected by the online tools.

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To explore this further I ran the tool on the following government websites

section508.gov (the accessibility standards website) whitehouse.gov irs.gov iCEVonline.com

And they all failed with similar issues to the ones on Canvas.

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If our course is approved, we are required to get an independent body to certify the accessibility of our course website. This is due on May 5, 2017.

Frustratingly CanvasLMS does not provide a way to search within a course. Who doesn’t these days. I found a (short) thread on their forum which did provide a simple solution - Google Custom Search.

Here is the discussion on the CanvasLMS community board.

Fiverr - it’s not always $5

Once you post, you get a whole bunch of replies, and the expectation is that you gotta get back, right, away! But I had to play on my terms. I selected a few people and payed them $5 to get “used to our system”. This helped me winnow down the list to the ones I know will work well. Now I am hoping they will be free to work on my project when I need them in 2 weeks.