Ok guys, here’s a tiny little “game” that I wrote for my 20 month old. He just loves it, so I was thinking about tweaking it a little and seeing if I could sell it for $5 to other parents with kids around the same age (18-36 months). I’m about to test drive it on a bunch of my friends who are also parents.
Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback you guys could give me. http://jace.reyelts.com/babybash/babybash.jnlp.
God bless,
-Toby Reyelts
Neat 
I don’t have any kids but bashing a keyboard, pretty flashing colours, I suppose that’s good fun for young kids ;D
[quote]Neat
I don’t have any kids but bashing a keyboard, pretty flashing colours, I suppose that’s good fun for young kids ;D
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Yeah, he gets a big kick out of it. What’s really surprising to me, is that he can already pick out most of the letters, so it really is semi-educational.
Btw, the program has a bunch of options:
But I don’t have any configuration screen, right now. It just reads them out of a config file. Since you’re using it via JWS, you can’t easily modify your config file.
I guess if I wanted to allow users to keep settings via JWS, I’d have to go full-fledged with javax.prefs or something like that.
God bless,
-Toby Reyelts
Cool idea. It runs very smoothly for me (Windows XP / 1.5Ghz / AMD Athalon 2400+ / 512MB RAM)
however, I’m pretty curious why something like that takes up ~2.5MB?
I just tried it with my 13 month old son and he enjoyed the noises and letter shapes - he kept wanting another go
I’d thought about doing something similar to this as Connor (my son) is very interested in my keyboard and mouse! Here’s a few sugestions:
The key repeat can make it a bit confusing (well, for me anyway ;D) and the screen can quickly fill this way.
Add some sort of mouse pointer. Connor likes moving the mouse and has associated the mouse wheel with moving windows up and down. Perhaps the mouse buttons could be used too.
If it’s for kids then a nice, jolly setting would be fun and it would be good if the letters did something rather than just disappear. How’s about a nice bright blue sky with a sun and scudding clouds. In this scenario the letters could be baloons that burst with the mouse pointer as a bird. Or if the background were to stay dark the letters could explode like fireworks.
The voice is excellent! Is it yours?
[quote]however, I’m pretty curious why something like that takes up ~2.5MB?
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lol forget I said that… my speakers were on mute when I was playing it! :
[quote]The key repeat can make it a bit confusing (well, for me anyway ;D) and the screen can quickly fill this way.
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Ok, I’ll see what I can do about it. I’m not exactly sure how to handle it, though, programmatically. Anybody got any suggestions?
[quote]Add some sort of mouse pointer. Connor likes moving the mouse and has associated the mouse wheel with moving windows up and down. Perhaps the mouse buttons could be used too.
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That’s a good idea. Elijah loves the mouse too…
[quote]If it’s for kids then a nice, jolly setting would be fun and it would be good if the letters did something rather than just disappear. How’s about a nice bright blue sky with a sun and scudding clouds. In this scenario the letters could be baloons that burst with the mouse pointer as a bird. Or if the background were to stay dark the letters could explode like fireworks.
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Neat ideas. I’ll have to experiment with some of them. Animating ballon bursting letters could be kind of a pain though. Fireworks would probably be a lot easier.
[quote]The voice is excellent! Is it yours?
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Lol. Yeah, that’s my voice. (Even the “dwoop” sound the letters make when they bounce). Thanks for the compliment.
God bless,
-Toby Reyelts
Hey, sounds like you’ve got the same idea I have with an app I’m in the middle of writing. Check out daughterware if you haven’t. (Theres a thread here, though its pretty old.
When I tried to run your app, I got nothing but a black screen. 
I’m on a mac G4, os 10.3.7, jre 1.4.x
Regards,
Dr. A>
You gotta start bashing! That was my confusion at first. I loaded it up and stared for a minute waiting for something to happen like instructions hehe. I hope your kid doesn’t learn to associate a black screen with wailing on the comp otherwise you might start getting keyboard errors during bootup sequences ;D
I liked the game… maybe a little too much. I found it most fun to wail on “i” over and over again. So I’m in touch with my inner child I guess hehe. I’m on Windows, Java 1.5, and the sound response was slow for me. At least half a second between a click and the playing of a sound.
Wow, I just had some major flashbacks! Very interesting… but I didn’t find a single baby to bash.