Frequently Asked Questions
No, Dave's Galaxy does not have a bathroom.
Keeps out the riffraff
Seriously, it should be fairly easy to support IE 9, but I don't have a copy of windows, or a machine to run it on. there are some (probably easy) bugs that would need to be fixed before it would work. Dave's Galaxy uses SVG for rendering, which is only supported in IE 9. I think I've only been asked for IE support twice, I do most of my advertising in places were most everyone runs a different browser.
If you would still like to play Dave's Galaxy, I recommend either Chrome or Firefox.
This one is more difficult. SVG renders too slowly on the iPhone/iPad, and the UI would need a major overhaul to support touch input. If I switch rendering over to canvas, I would need to write quite a bit of code to handle things that SVG gives me automatically, so I'm a little leery of doing so.
It's definately on my radar though. I think this would make an awesome game for the iPad, just need to get it working.
The game has a reasonably good help system, you can access it on the map under menu-->help. Some parts of the rules I keep fairly vague -- this serves two purposes: 1. keeps people from relentlessly min-maxing the game. 2. it allows you to discover how things work, which is fun. Making mistakes and finding your way are under appreciated game mechanics, part of what makes life worth while.
The tutorial in the help system will get you over the initial learning curve, the biggest thing is to at least build a few colonies -- get your eggs out of 1 basket as soon as possible.
Server side, it's mostly Python and Django. On the browser, it's SVG, and Javascript/jQuery. I use Linode for hosting, they are a very nice company.
The map is totally custom made, I use a few jquery plugins here and there (the bubble help, color picker, etc...). If you like what you see, I am available on a contracting basis -- take a look at my resume.