Being responsible for the Stylelabs planning, I decided to start a bit earlier with my new year resolutions. I promised myself we would get our wishes out before Christmas. Deadline for final tests: 15/12/2007.
Alas! I’m one of those people who already broke a resolution before 2008 even got a change to start. Guilty, I am…
However, I would like to make a plea for a shared responsibility with the technical department & Silverlight.
The dev team wanted to do something ‘exciting & new’ for our Christmas card. This resulted in the idea of creating a Christmas game programmed in Silverlight. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash, or – the way I have interpreted – a technology which makes it acceptable that developers get their hands dirty on the thing called ‘design’(but that’s by no means confirmed by anyone official ;-) ).
The Silverthingie was actually still in alfa. Seemed harmless to me, so the dev guys got it their way. All went quite well, till I started testing and noticed they had left out the ‘submit your score’ part.
They had encountered some issues…
Turned out that ‘text boxes’ don’t exist yet in Silverlight!
Having a game without being able to submit your score is quite stupid, so we had to spend some more time to find a solution. The solution being found, I started testing again. I submitted my score, tried to insert my e-mail but for some reason the thing didn’t want to accept the characters for which I had to use the shift button… Not really handy indeed .
And thus we encountered another issue…
I will spare you the technical details (Tom can bore you with that if you’re interested), but after a frustrating period of searching, we had to accept our defeat. A mini keyboard was added and you have to select the characters of your name and e-mail by clicking it with your mouse.
Since we would have the same shit with the S2F, we decided not to make that form in Silverlight.
Today we will send our wishes, and actually the result looks quite nice. It was an interesting experience for our team and we hope our clients will be willing to download Sliverlight on their computer to enjoy our New Year game (and we hope our clients fully comprehend this is alpha technology, with all it's flaws). It’s a great opportunity for them to see a real life application of this new technology (of which they surely have heard a lot already).
Enjoy the game!
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