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I was checking out what’s new on new grounds this morning and watched this neat short “the faun and the nymph” which is heavily inspired by the work of biteycastle who did the 2d artwork and animation for dragonage 2D.

This got me thinking about how a strong distant SIGNAL can attract attention and potentially RELAY information back to the receiver about someone or something in their own background. It would be interesting to try to map the process.

Awhile back, James Duncan started a “signal parties” mapping project. We should re-visit this work. I’ll see if James is open to adding it to my Github for now [hey maybe we should create a we get signal github!] so we can have a working prototype up on this site to play around with.

A few months ago, I paid the $100 and signed up my solo sandbox, Headwinds Studio, for the iPhone developer program. Along with wanting to learn Objective C and play with it on my iPhone, I was also totally convinced that the iPhone was the device for 2010 after hearing the news that Flash CS5 would be able publish iPhone apps. Again, that was 3 months ago, and today with the release of the latest iPhone 4.0 SDK, I was disappointed to learn that apps produced with web technologies like Flash or HTML/CSS/Javascript (ie Titanium)  would now be blocked on the iPhone. Bummer.

Oh well…CS5 wasn’t my only reason for signing up for the iPhone Dev program. I’m also interested in Objective C and bought a couple books on the subject after watching John Stringham prototype with Box2D and listening to my friend Adam Hunter (an iPhone/iPad developer) exclaim its virtues on our weekly drive to our Ultimate games. With the introduction of function closures,  Objective C now has all the benefits of being a first class citizen like AS3 or Java — its just different but not beyond the grasp of any decent developer.

Of course Digger Dwarves isn’t even finished, and still I’m looking into its mobile future. By then, I may have decided to trade in my iPhone for the latest flavor of Android or Apple might have re-thought their position. Any case, I really shouldn’t care about it but can’t help getting caught up in following the flood of outrage.

Beyond Flash or Javascript, what’s a script-kiddie to do? perhaps that’s where Lua comes in…

If you were a hardcore World of Warcraft player, you may have had customized Lua UI. This scripting language is also used by many other games companies:

And now — thanks to Ansca Mobile — it’s available for the iPhone/iPad and they want Flash developers

A quote from their blog states that its iPhone/iPad safe too:

“It is true that when you develop your app, you’re initially developing in Lua. But when you click “Build”, you are getting a real bonafide XCode-produced executable binary. Obviously, I’m leaving some details out (that’s our secret sauce) but ultimately your binary is produced by compiling a combination of Objective-C and C++ code. We use XCode to compile and link these binaries to official iPhone Documented API’s. It’s why we have always required you to install Apple’s iPhone SDK.”

The 30 trial is free and I plan to kick its tires, and see if it could be a good fit down the road.

Its far too early to tell what will happen when we’re ready to port something to mobile — its changing too fast which isn’t comforting. Right now, I’m putting more faith in the Flash portal sites which have stayed true to the platform for years now.

The only weird thing you might see is this fuschia coloured button.. click it to flag yourself as ‘ready to battle’. The next person who clicks it will be paired up with you.

Digger Dwarves Gameplay Screenshot

Digger Dwarves was the original We Get Signal project, and quite an overambitious one at that. Still, we’ve been chugging away on it… slowly. The game is really just a prototype right now, but you can do some neat stuff, like dig in the snow and throwing snowballs.

All the terrain is generated from a bitmap, and the collisions are determined pixel-by-pixel. So far it’s a neat demo, not much else.

For the controls, the arrow keys move you and down arrow digs. Spacebar jumps, and the ‘Z’ key throws a snowball.

The newest addition has been the loading of external bitmaps, and ‘undiggable’ terrain (dark blue snow/ice.)

So, give it a try.. and let us know if you like it.