Tabletop Pixel’s first game “Super Puzzle Neo” is going to be released on Tizen very soon (assuming everything is going well during the validation process)!

You are going to ask me “But what the hell is Tizen and why are you going to ship your bootstrapping game on this first?”

So let’s explain: Tizen is a new OS designed for mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, fridges, TVs, cars … with companies like Intel, Samsung and the Linux foundation behind and supported by phone carriers like Docomo and Orange. You may have never heard about it yet because it’s not released. It’s currently scheduled to hit the market in 2014. Even the developers (like me) are most likely developing with a simulator and an emulator without any real device.

2014/03/02 update: the app have been approved right after, but there is still no Tizen devices on the market.

Now “why“: because Tizen launched an application contest with more than $4 million in prizes! Smallest one is $40k … tempting isn’t it ?

2014/03/02 update: finally I didn’t get any reward, but it was worth to try ).

When I heard about it two weeks ago (I try to not cry when I think that this contest have been launched AGES ago and I’ve never heard about it before) I instantly dropped my current iOS polishing process to jump on the Tizen board: with only one month before the deadline (December 8th) and the necessity to have an app registered in the app store before to participate, I had to learn fast.

Hopefully, one of Tizen’s core is webkit and guess what? Super Puzzle Neo is basically an HTML5 game (even if I don’t like this term and the image of “crappy game with bad performances” it conveys; I prefer to talk about ”javascript hybrid application”) so there was no big problem for porting the code. Also, the SDK is remarkably well-done  and I have been pleasantly surprised multiple times: the tools, the help, the support, the processes … everything around Tizen have a professional look and feel and reflects people who know what they are doing and who are doing it well.

The javascript API provides a straightforward access to all hardware features without having to deal with any wrapper, and also (as far as I understood) to a lot of low level system stuff (as a developer I feel really excited with this, having the sensation that I can build an OS over the OS with only javascript, but I’m afraid this may turn into security problems in the future).

So, now I am really excited about this OS and I look forward to having a real device in the hands. When on the other side Apple is taking grating decisions like removing developers ability to hide the navigation bar by themselves in the browser, Tizen is a fresh breeze and may be a great boost for the HTML5 development scene, hopefully a way to finally give it the crown and the scepter it deserves.

I will post about Super Puzzle Neo itself in the future.

By dTb • Categories: Studio • Share on: