06.Jun.2010 How it started

Back in the 90′s I was a fan of the Amiga game Logical. A couple of years ago I tried it again in an emulator and noticed it was still fun.

Now largely forgotten, even many Amiga fans dont remember or even played this game, it had pretty uniqe, and very addictive gameplay. It was made by Rainbow Arts (now defunct), a german game development shop. Not a lot of info on this game is available on the web, but there is these entries at Lemon Amiga and HOL.

About the same time I was getting into JavaScript development, learning the language properly, reading Douglas Crockfords, JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language. I was certainly one of the guilty ones, having used it some in web development, but never understood there was a proper object oriented language in there.

So I started out with some experiments with animating divs. I “discovered” it was definetly feasible to implement fast moving sprite based games on a web page, while keeping CPU utillization in check. JavaScript garabage collection interrupting the timers were problems at this time though, even in A-grade browsers. I remember animations were not exactly smooth.

At this time I wasnt very interested in mobile phones, the iPhone had just been introduced, but wasnt on my radar yet. I was loosely aiming for a web game played on a computer in the browser. I had a very early test version, using some ripped gfx, then I kind of lost interest.

Some years later, the beginning of 2010, I had gotten into mobile phones with touch screens. I had my Nokia N900 in my pocket, and this project entered my mind again. Wouldnt Logical work really good on a small device with a touch screen?