Now, first and foremost, I am not that proud about the idea behind this game. I know it doesn’t solve any problem, doesn’t make anyone’s life easier or make the world a better place, and obviously there is a questionable educational value in it. Said that, I have been recently laid off from a company (in NYC) that is going under, and wanted to brush up a bit on my programming skills, as for couple years now I’ve been mostly managing IT projects and truly missed designing and developing software big time.
DrawSomethingNaughty was designed with PHP, HTML5 Canvas, JavaScript and JQuery, plus MySql. It took one full week of time. Canvas were something I wanted to learn the most, and obviously learnt a lot new experience designing for web on mobile devices: Android and IOS (I don’t believe this "app" would be approved in the store; that’s why I took extra care of trying to make a touch device experience in the browser as flawless as possible). Programming-wise IOS was more pleasant than Android, and there is still a glitch in drawing on the latter. I failed miserably on CSS layering. I just don’t get it, wasted one day and at some point decided to cheat and go back to tables. Another fail (although bit controlled) was with MVP - that urge to keep adding features before getting first user. I did however keep noting all future improvements and add-ons on the side (my mind really went wild and I hope to see some of those popping up from Zynga anytime now, as there is a huge monetization potential no way related to annoying users with ads), has this game gain some reasonable traction.
Now, obvious question is how much of a rip off of DrawSomething this is and whether Zynga will be urged to go after me. I spent some time on this one, weighted for and against, and decided to continue project consequently. For obvious reasons (hello Zynga lawyers!), I am gonna leave the list I came up with out of this post, and won’t comment on it. I also did some trademark research, and couldn’t find anything on "Draw Something", even though this is not the name of my project.
DrawSomethingNaughty was tested against Samsung Galaxy i977, iOS Phone/Pad/Pod and it came up pretty playable. But if you see something wrong on your device, please post it here, or send a screenshot with name of your device to screenshot@drawsomethingnaughty.com
Anything else, please ask.
Thanks for reading.
ps: I have been reading HN and commenting a bit for a while now, but again because of the idea behind this is not that cool ("oh, I designed that app for people to draw dicks and learn cursewords"), I decided to post it under a new account. Hope you will forgive me.
pretty cool, and quite impressive that it only took you a week.
and no need to beat yourself up over it, there’s nothing wrong with putting out something just for fun. does DrawSomething solve any real problems, make the world a better, or make people’s lives easier..? not really (or at all).
regarding device issues, any chance of optimizing it a bit for WP as well?
it loads up nicely on my device and everything works perfectly up until i actually start to draw, something.. when i try to drag (i.e. draw a line) it just moves my screen around..? also, minor issue, the display also doesn’t quite fill-out my screen and there’s a bar of white space at the bottom (i think this may be because the WP7 browser has fewer menus/less chrome than on iOS and Android, so spacing differs)
As to an idea, when showing it to some friends everyone said "its cool" and everything, but at the same time they were asking "aren't there more interesting projects to code?", and frankly speaking until now [1] I didnt have any.
As of WP7 I haven't test it at all, simply because I do not have a WP device :( I did 3 trips to Apple store to test-drive everything on iPad (the new one) because there were some minor ongoing glitches (outlook related, not software wise. btw: I am happy to share all my development notes, if someone is interested). I will look for a code to prevent moving screen on WP7, something that is particulary locked on ios/andro, so drawing should work for you soon. I will visit Verizon/ATT shop and will test it thoroughly on your device then, lol :)
[1] recently it came to me that HTML5 Canvas could serve as technology for signaturing documents, where Public Notary is not needed. Example: real estate sale. Lots of documents do not require PN to be present. It takes days to obtain those back and forth. The idea is to give attorneys tool to upload legal document, generate unique code and send it to a client that can look it up on his touch-held device and securely sign the document. But obviously I need to do much more research into it. Any comment, welcome!
Edit: Simba, if you could send a screenshot of your WP7 device, I could fix all the elements' positioning. Fixing them all at once would prevent from scrolling, as there would be nothing to scroll :) thnx.
regarding [1], that would be very cool. recently went through the process of incorporating; involved quite a bit of printing, signing, scanning, emailing back, etc.. not being all that technical, i have no idea how you'd implement that.. but, if you could get something like what you described to work (and work in a way that’s hassle free for both senders and signees, as well as secure) that would be very interesting.
