Building Wooga’s Pocket Island in Windows

Last week, social/mobile game developer Wooga released the code of one of their HTML5 games as open source.

Unfortunately for Windows users, the whole application was built in a Mac. Because of this, a lot of Unix-y stuff they put in won’t work even if you install minGW e.g. #! executables and egrep/printf.

Normally, I’d just suggest a Windows user to just install Linux on a virtual machine but that would be too easy.

Taking these problems instead as a challenge, I tried to get around them by playing around with the code. After tweaking tasks/build.rake for a bit, somehow things just worked. Yay!

screenshot of the game on windows

So for those interested, here’s how to build the game on Windows 7 (haven’t tried it on XP but it should work):

• Install Ruby + DevKit + msysgit. Or just get RailsInstaller to install all of that for you.
• Install Node.js
• Add msysgit’s minGW and Node.js to your PATH. e.g ;C:\RailsInstaller\Git\bin;C:\Program Files\nodejs\.
• Clone my fork and use the win-kludge branch:

  git clone git://github.com/bryanbibat/Pocket-Island.git
  cd Pocket-Island
  git checkout win-kludge
  
  

• Download and extract the images to the images folder.
• Follow the installation normally.

  npm install -g less jslint
  gem install spritopia
  rake
  
  

• (optional) Start the simple static server then open http://localhost:4567/ipad.html.

  gem install sinatra
  ruby -rubygems server.rb
  
  

• (optional) Install Java and run the rake all.

  rake all
  cd build
  copy ..\server.rb .
  ruby -rubygems server.rb