PresidentialPrizeFight.com is one of the more interesting (and challenging) projects I've worked on recently. It was a lot of fun discovering techniques to make a fun and hopefully challenging boxing game. Most 2D fighters allow for much more flexible movement (jumping, flipping etc...) but for boxing movement is pretty much just back and forth and attacks are limited to your gloves. This certainly made the enemy AI easier to program but made achieving enjoyable game play a bit harder.

Of course, the boxing was just part of this game. There's the whole electoral map/multiplayer issue as well. Google App Engine is used as the data store for all the state data, so we shouldn't have to worry about traffic issues if we happen to get dugg.

The coolest thing about the whole experience is that we actually utilized every production person in our studio on the same project (a first).

The goal in creating Presidential Prize Fight was to create a fun way to learn about the electoral college and to give you a chance to punch that "other candidate" in the face. I think we've achieved that. But don't take my word for it, pick your candidate and win the map!

P.S. It appears that more McCain supporters are fighting for this map than Obama supporters... if you support Obama you need to win a few fights (hint: focus on "battleground states")

There's lots of hype surrounding the recent launch of Google's new "Platform in the Cloud" called App Engine. Simply put "Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications."

I'm one of the fortunate 10,000 developers that has access to the service (those invites went fast) and I have to say that it's an amazing service from a developers perspective. Writing a data driven, instantly scalable web app has never been easier. Now if they would only offer better file storage like Amazon's S3.

There's already lots of different perspectives on what this means and people tend to be cautiously accepting of the service so far.  Here's my 2 cents:

• This is exciting for web developers because its going to cause an "arms race" to create the next big cloud service platform (hurry up Microsoft, you're running late, again.) The competition is going to be stiff which will cause prices to stay low and services to get better
• This is exciting for web developers because it's abstracting a lot of the areas that truly creative and innovative developers shouldn't have to worry about (object relational mapping, CRUD operations and scaling primarily.)
• This is a little scary for web developers because it might require you to "sell your soul" to one platform or another. Google has a chance to "not be evil" here by creating an open platform that allows both code and data portability.
• This is a little scary for web developers because it requires a different way of thinking about web application development. For one, cloud based services don't support typical relational data models that we're all used to. That's a BIG adjustment in development methodology.

I could go on... but in summary I think that the App Engine is an exciting development that will push web development into a new era. An exciting and scary new era. I for one am going to jump in with both feet and I'll try to document the process on this blog. Stay tuned!