ODTUG APEX Gaming Competition - How'd They Do It? (Part 5)

At Kscope 15 this year we launched the first ever ODTUG APEX game competition. The APEX community responded with 15 entries! Each and every one of them left me thinking "How'd they do that?" So, let's find out more about the games and those who wrote them.

Since it's Friday, it's Daniel Hochleitner's turn.

First off, tell me a little about yourself.

My name is Daniel Hochleitner and I can be reached on Twitter at @Dani3lSun

How many years of APEX experience do you have?

Round about 7 years, started with APEX 3.1.

What motivated you to participate in the APEX Gaming Competition?

The day Vincent first posted it on twitter, I thought that´s a really cool idea, instead of building highly weight database business applications, a game that uses the database and APEX is great. So features like HTML5 and stuff like that will move in focus. 

So i decided just after an hour after the tweet to participate in this competition, just to show others and particularly people who are not so much into APEX whats possible with it.

What is the name of your game?

CrappyBird (It´s Open Source under: https://github.com/Dani3lSun/apex-app-crappybird)

Briefly describe your game.

CrappyBird is designed to function best an mobile devices (mobile first!:)). Because I liked the original game „FlappyBird“ from the mobile AppStores so much, because of the simplicity but funny gameplay (Play it from time to time, shortly in a break or at home at couch, without thinking to much, just playing and have fun:)) 

Aim of CrappyBird is to drive the bird through the landscape without hitting the tubes (getting points for every passed tube) and to mess your performance with other people. Other people means, against all registered users, your twitter friends and people that are in your local area (via GPS). 

This social part was missing in the original game, but I wanted all features that I would thought they are missing in this game to be present, beside the social factor that was the GPS part and to customize the playground (changing colors of bird, tubes, ground, etc.) and share this themes with other people (very funny layouts possible:))

How long did it take you to develop your games?

Thats a difficult question, because I developed the game in my spare time from time to time over several weeks. I think it was round about 6 weeks and 70-90 hours.

What was the most challenging element of your game design and how did you overcome it?

The most challenging parts were: 

Twitter Integration: Wrote a complete Twitter API that uses Twitter REST API (Application-only Authentication). That part was interesting, learning much about current web services and OAuth procedures, at some points a bit try and error but overall great success and fun using PLSQL to find out followers, do twitter searches on hashtags etc.. (I´m planning to clean up this package and make it open source to everyone in a single package without the game dependencies) 

The game view it self: Wrapping Javascript and CSS and the static resources like images into a PLSQL package that renders the game and replaces all the colors that a user has chosen on page load 

HTML 5: This consist of the GPS part (with distance select statements between 2 users using Spatial and the gps coordinates) - the HTML5 canvas part (The game is a HTML canvas element and to make screenshots of the canvas using javascript (used for sharing themes))

Alright, how can I play?

URL: https://apex.danielh.de/ords/f?p=CB Just register and you can play the game.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Thanks for that cool competition, and hopefully not that last one! ;)

Thanks, Daniel. Nothing crappy about this game. In the coming days we'll share more insight into the other games that were part of the contest.

...our journey continues