mrgan:

The Bits

There’s no better home for a fast-paced, goofy arcade game than your pocket. Remember the original joy of gaming - you know, before the distraction of drawn-out story lines, tutorials, endless dialog, and complicated rules? You want to just fire up a game and go, cucumber-cool 8-bit graphics blazing under your fingers. Swipe left, swipe right, eat all the berries, avoid the angry chefs chasing you around their pie kitchen. Then repeat at a higher speed.

The Sweet Solution

And there’s no easier way to get an app than by installing it right from its website - that’s right, easier than the App Store. One tap and you’re set. Because it’s a web app, see. Not one of those where you need to be online either - once you add Pie Guy to your home screen, it’ll run even when you’re not connected to the Internet. And of course, your game will be saved to a local database. Read on.


History

I made pie guy in a fit of WebKit excitement combined with App Store frustration. I wanted a Javascript game that didn’t feel… texty.

Needful Things

Pie Guy will run on iPhone 3GS with OS 3.0 or higher installed. Swipe anywhere on the screen (no need to point at Guy himself) and feel free to queue up your turns as in classic arcade games (meaning, once you swipe, Guy will turn that way next time this is possible.) With each level, the chefs get angrier. Godspeed.

Fringe Benefits

If you find Pie Guy a fun game to play, well that’s grand.

But, I hope Pie Guy will also be an opportunity for the code-savvy among you to learn a trick or two about making serious web apps for the iPhone. Just grab my source code and tweak it. I’m not talking about just a fancied-up webpage here; this is a fullscreen game, with fast gameplay and responsive touch controls. I can’t wait to see what a better programmer does with this stuff (it’s not hard to program better than me!)

Go go go

Pie Guy is available for totally free from http://mrgan.com/pieguy. Hit that on your iPhone, install once, and play forever. By the way, if there are updates to the game and you’re online when you launch it, the updates will be automatically installed. Web apps, dudes.

P.S. If you’d like to tip your developer, why not buy a shirt. Or, heck, buy anything else on my Amazon Store.