Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born on March 6, 1475. In his lifetime, he created many of the world’s most famous works of art, including the famous statue of David and the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. He also designed great works of architecture such as the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library.

I’m telling you, they just don’t make artists like they used to.

In honor of Michelangelo’s birthday, “Michelangelo: The Game” will be free for the next three days.
You can get the game here on iTunes!

It’s February 14th. Valentine’s Day, my birthday, and also the day that Michelangelo, my iOS / HTML5 puzzle game, was released on the iTunes App store! It’s available now for the low, low price of 99 cents.

See screenshots of the game here.
Check it out on iTunes here!

Anyone who’s been following my Twitter account (@nobunagaota) will have seen me posting a regular stream of obscure and hopelessly geeky tweets tagged #glass.  For my latest project, I decided to use Twitter to log my thoughts during development.  Those tweets are posts regarding my current project: a mobile puzzle game called Michelangelo written in HTML5.

Michelangelo? Yes, as in the Renaissance artist.  Why were the tweets tagged #glass? Well, “Glass” is the project code name I’m using while developing the game.  Originally, I was planning on theming the game on stained glass but I eventually settled on the works of Michelangelo.

This project started after I went to a seminar on HTML5 and CSS3.  Seeing how much the HTML/CSS feature set had grown, I decided to see how suitable it was for making a game.  And what better way to test that suitability than actually making a game?  I also decided to use this opportunity to get my feet wet in smartphone development for iOS (and Android).

The challenge I set for myself was to make Michelangelo a full, feature-complete game (multiple stages, unlockable content, high scores, etc.) using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.  By using technologies with which I am only somewhat familiar on a platform with strict performance characteristics, I figured this project would be a good chance to learn some new programming techniques.

My plan going forward is to release Michelangelo for iOS and then port it over to Android.  Since, I’m using Phonegap and HTML5, porting the game should be trivially easy, but we’ll see how that goes.

I’ll post more about Michelangelo here as the project continues.  Look forward to it!