We’re a winner in the BlackBerry Lighthouse competition and created one of the best apps. The competition was hard and the stakes were high, but we pushed through some late nights, sometimes spending 20+ hours in non-stop coding sessions to make this story possible.
We developed this application using methodologies that we successfully deploy with our customers, including product kickstart, agile product development, and mobile application development workflows that leverage our world-renowned Sencha Touch expertise.
The contest
A few months ago, BlackBerry launched a contest, dubbed the “Lighthouse program”. This contest was designed to for developers all around the world to create awesome applications for the Blackberry Z10 using using Sencha Touch technology. Given Sencha’s recent announcements on Sencha Touch support BBOS10 and great remarks on the Sencha HTML5 scorecard for the BBZ10, we absolutely had to jump in on the game!
About our entry
We entered the Lighthouse program with an ambitious project to port our Rvrsit game to the Blackberry Z10. Rvrsit is a game that is a play on Reversi, a strategy board game invented around 130 years ago. Rvrsit is built using ImpactJS, an HTML5 gaming framework and Sencha Touch for the UI.
Sencha Touch was chosen because of it’s fantastic ability to render user interfaces in the mobile browser that mimic those of native.
It turns out that running a game engine along side with an HTML5 UI framework is something that is not only challenging for developers, but also for mobile devices and is a real world test for a platform’s capabilities for it’s ability to work responsively under load.
The Blackberry Z10 : Our impression
Almost immediately after starting this project, we discovered that the Z10 is a fantastic device for building mobile HTML5 applications. The Z10 is not only extremely responsive for Sencha Touch-based HTML5 applications, but under the load of ImpactJS, the Z10 really shines.
Rvrsit’s playing field is powered by ImpactJS and renders the gameboard 30 times per second, providing smooth animations for the game board transitions. This type of refresh is taxing, especially on mobile devices, however the Z10 did not struggle at all with the demands of the gameboard all the while constant CSS3 transitions are running at the top of the game to indicate who’s turn it is.
Take it for a spin
Rvrsit is a phenomenal demonstration of HTML5 gaming capabilities, but is still very early in it’s development cycle. If you are lucky to have a Z10 and want to see the magic of Rvrsit for yourself, point your Z10’s browser to the developer version here api.rvrs.it/debug.html.
Our goal is to finalize multiplayer and publish Rvrsit to the BlackBerry application store.
Our thanks to BlackBerry and Sencha!
We’d like to extend our thanks BlackBerry and Sencha for allowing us to participate in this effort. Blackberry did a fantastic job in organizing and supporting the lighthouse program and highlighted us as a winner as well as others in their blog post.
Take a look at the fantastic video that BlackBerry produced at SenchaCon ’13!
Have a valuable BlackBerry app development experience to share? Found a bug while playing Rvrsit? Share your opinions in the comments below.
