Plant Wars

My parents brought a box of my old school papers and journals and whatnot from their house last weekend, and one of the things in the box was my journal from first grade. I was six. Apparently my parents were letting me play Wolfenstein 3D already. Awesome.
Wolfenstein 3D was released on May 5, 1992 for [...]

I was playing with this neat tool for searching for short domain names that was on Hacker News and discovered that the domain name jon.to was available. I figured I’d never come across the opportunity to get jon.anything again for a long time, so I searched for how to go about registering a domain name [...]

When people playing Plant Wars train their characters, they frequently encounter a captcha. This is in order to prevent people playing using an auto-refresher or a more sophisticated bot. Interesting trivia: captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Originally, I had used reCAPTCHA. I felt good about [...]

Here’s the scenario:
You have some content that you’re pulling from a database. It’s user-generated, so you have no guarantee that it makes sense. That means that people could fill up all the allowed characters without entering any spaces, insert quotation marks and apostrophes, and anything else. Now, you want to display this data in, say, [...]

Part one is here.
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I was recently asked to write a postmortem (it’s sort of a “lessons learned” from the development process) for Plant Wars for Building Browsergames, and I just finished, so I thought I would share it here in its entirety:
This is Jon from Plant Wars, which is yet another PBBG (what else would I be doing [...]

So a few months ago, this guy named Oli joined Plant Wars. I noticed that he had a Buskerwars e-mail address, so I asked him if he was a developer on that project. He said he was, and we had a friendly chat about game development. Busker, by the way, is a British word for [...]

This blog will have to do with the development process of creating a browser-based game, new game features, and maybe occasionally the trials and tribulations of being a new father.
I will share the approach and specifics of how some features are developed and hopefully, this information will be of use to other developers.
As an introductory [...]