Bubble Babble Cake

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:58:41 +0100

Web and Game Development

It's been quite a while since you've heard from me, particularly with a cake recipe. This isn't to say I haven't been baking cookies & cakes, just that they've not been particularly interesting recipes Last week was a bit of a celebration for me though, so I dug out my favourite carrot cake recipe (much to Larry's annoyance because it includes banana!) So for the release of Bubble Babble, my second solo project in my 2 years working for Astraware, I baked this lovely, moist, nutty carrot cake

Cake
175g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
175ml sunflower oil
225g coarsely grated carrots
3 ripe bananas, mashed
100g chopped walnuts
280g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp baking powder

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4. Grease and line a 9inch cake tin.

Throw all the ingredients into a big bowl and beat the mixture until smooth (well, as smooth as it can be with bits of carrot and walnut! )

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 1 hour or until well risen, golden brown, and a skewer or sharp knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave in the tin for 10 minutes and then turn out, remove the lining paper, and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Frosting
200g cream cheese
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
115g icing sugar

To make the frosting beat all the ingredients together until smooth

At this point, I stole an artist to help decorate my cake. With lots of food colouring, some marzipan, and a pair of chopsticks we created the lovely watery scene. Never before have I seen anyone "paint" with cream cheese icing using a chop stick! Although it did work surprisingly well

If you don't have an artist to hand, then just cover the cake with the icing, and perhaps dot a few pieces of walnut on the top, before slicing into generous pieces and trying to fend off the swarm of hungry people! Or perhaps everyone in my office is just underfed?

Bubble Babble was a really fun project to work on. It all started with an idea from Steve for the basic gameplay and slowly evolved through prototypes and long design meetings into the game that's now available to buy I really love word games so it was great to work on a game which I keep finding myself playing, even now I'm not on a bug hunt! If you enjoy word games then I highly recommend you give it a try, although I might be a little biased

Expanding onto Symbian and BlackBerry

Fri, 30 May 2008 17:37:56 +0100

David Oakley

Chief Technology Officer

One of the really good outcomes of our acquisition by Handmark earlier this year is the opportunity to get our games into the hands of smartphone owners who haven't so far had access to them, and to give existing Astraware customers a wider choice of phones to run our games. There are two parts to this: the chance to develop for new device operating systems (platforms), and also the ability to get our games sold direct to mobile/cell phone customers on providers such as Sprint and Telus. I'll stick to talking about the first part though...

The first new platform release of 2008 was Symbian (S60 and UIQ) when Astraware Boardgames was released in March. Work on Symbian had actually been going on since the start of 2007, so it was good to see the first game let loose! Hidden Expedition: Titanic and Astraware Solitaire have just followed and Platypus is nearly ready for release. Converting our games to Symbian is now a pretty smooth process, so you can expect to see our other own-brand titles appearing as well as time goes on. Larry has done the vast majority of the work that went into our own-developed games onto Symbian, and I must prod him to write about his experiences...

The first new development platform of 2008 has been BlackBerry. It's a platform that until very recently we'd not ventured into as old BlackBerry smartphones used to be rather unfriendly when it came to games. Software for BlackBerry is written in Java rather than the C++ that we code in for all our other platforms, so we've had to write a new version of our game framework to work in the new (to us) language. But the opportunity has become huge, and once RIM released the pink Pearl, we knew they were gunning for the consumer and that it made sense for us to start work!

An interesting aspect of the BlackBerry is going to be the fact that they are generally sold with a data plan, which isn't something we've been able to count on with other smartphones. One of the things I hope we'll gain from being part of Handmark is that they have been much more used to using data and networking, so it will push us to innovate there. I'll write another time on our thinking around mobile "gamer card" ideas and other such things.

To make sure that we understand what it is to be BlackBerry users, Howard, Alison and I have recently started using BlackBerry Curve smartphones. It's very early days on that, so we're still learning how things work.

LRCOE Info

Bubble Babble Cake

Expanding onto Symbian and BlackBerry