Lucas, Bob, Logo, EK-LM3S1968

Lucas told me last week that he wanted to make a Bob game.  He's referring to a game that Steve Hales created for the Sidekick many moons back, and that both kids still love playing.  Lucas has some ideas about new levels, and he demanded that I should show him what to do to make this game.

I love his interest, I just wish it was that easy.

After a few days of thinking about how exactly I was going to help bring my 7 year old's dream to life, I decided that he would probably be happy learning how to "walk" first, and I need not get all stressed out about helping him "run"... at least not yet.

This past weekend, I set him up on my computer with ACSLogo.  Of course he was thrilled, and had lots of fun making the turtle move around the screen, and say funny things.  He has repeatedly asked to play some more, which is awesome.

This got me thinking about options for Lucas' game... I have a bag of old Sidekicks, so I looked into downloading the hiptop SDK, but that didn't go so well.  I have an iPad, but don't yet have the right version of Mac OS X to develop for it.  I have a Windows Phone, but that's a development device for work.  I have various other electronic gadgets, but nothing that could really pass as a game platform...

Then I remembered I have an EK-LM3S1968 evaluation kit from Luminary Micro (now TI).  It has a 128x96 OLED screen on it, a few buttons (including 4 in the shape of a d-pad!), and a speaker.  And it comes with a built-in maze game in the quickstart application, so there is example code to work from.

Now I'm working on a dinky little vertical scroller/shooter.  Lucas hasn't mentioned his Bob game since I sat him in front of ACSLogo, but now my interest is piqued. :-)

Sidekick

Lol... Found out from Wikipedia yesterday that the Sidekick is now being (re)sold in Canada as the mobiflip through Mobilicity.  It of course has none of the service benefits that made it awesome, but still fun to see it eek out a little more life.

The other thing I found out yesterday was that the Danger Developer Zone is offline, and has been for months.  This is not wholly unexpected with the Microsoft acquisition, but was sad because I was hoping to use the hiptop SDK to help my son write a game that he could take with him and show his friends.  I guess I'll have to use a more modern development environment...