There's something kinda cool about creating games on platforms that
weren't meant for game creation; it presents a whole set of
programmatic challenges that leads one to come up with creative
solutions to otherwise simple scenarios in typical gaming SDKs. It's
kind of a brain-teaser as it goes beyond typical business application
programming (generally boring, tedious, repetitive, and not fun) and
forces one to think about more...challenging and creative programming
tasks.
For a while, I was obsessed with writing games in HTML and JavaScript (Exhibit A, Exhibit B).
Trying to write Tetris was particularly interesting as I got stuck
trying to come up with a good algorithm for collision detection based
on my implementation of using unordered lists to form a grid.
So I found it quite awesome that someone actually took this idea to another level and wrote PacMan...for Excel!.
My Tetris implementation is actually kind of similar in concept as
it also utilizes the same basic technique of switching "cell"--in my
case, list items--background colors to simulate pixels. I actually
have a more complete version somewhere on my machine, but I have no
idea where it's buried
.