No News is Good News
We don't really have any news yet, because we don't have any products. Neonatura Games is in the final stages of development of its first title for the iPhone/iPod touch, ElectroBall. After over a year in development, the finish line seems to be within sight. Gameplay has been stable for months. Level design is finished, graphics seem complete. Sound engine, including its assembly language pieces, is all running smoothly. Sound effects and music still needs some fine tuning (yes, we do all of that ourselves too), but probably nothing major.
The web site is...well, the web site is a work in progress — still.
A Work in Progress
The web site you're reading has been built using in-house tools — we've named them DynaSite (cute, huh?) — that are being created and debugged at the same time we're trying to use them to generate this site. Getting it all to work reliably on different browsers, and across different platforms, has been a nightmare. Get something to work on FireFox, and it breaks in Internet Explorer 6. Get it to work in IE6, and — you guessed it — it doesn't work in FireFox. Once both of those are working, then IE8 throws trouble into the works — or Safari. We haven't even gotten around to trying Chrome or Opera — we don't have IE7, and the list goes on. And on. And on...
What Standards?
Thought web standards were supposed to prevent this kind of thing? Think again. Even the supposedly modern, standards-compliant browsers have big problems when trying to actually render the graphics of a web site correctly, especially when zooming in on a page or resizing the text.
Mobile Devices
And getting a site to work on mobile devices (specifically the iPhone, of course) generates further problems. Since a full-size site is often hard to use on such devices, we've created a set of mobile pages with the same content as our main desktop pages. What a pain!
This also nearly doubles the number of styles that one has to implement and perfect. Most graphical images used on the two sites are different — typically mobile graphics are either reduced in resolution or entirely diferent.
How are we Doing?
The long and short of it is that we've put an enormous amount of time and energy into just getting this web site up and running. With the level of complexity of the site and tools, there are bound to be problems.
So, if anybody's having trouble with our site, please let us know what your problem is and what platform you're using, and we'll do our best to try to get it working for everybody. There will probably be a few kinks at first though, so don't scream at us too loudly!
Hey...I guess there was news after all!