Visitors to our webpage will find that we have been passionate about video games since our high school years in the 80's. At that time, options to develop, store and distribute software were so limited that we used to sell Xerox copies of the actual Basic code to be typed into any Casio calculator capable of storing and running a group of instructions.

Other hardware we worked on were the Sinclair, the Atari and the Commodore micro computers, connected to our TVs. How cool, well, much better than the 20 characters line on those Casio calculators. We did some casual game developments in the 90s and early 00s for DOS, Windows and specially for Macintosh.

We started exploring Runtime Revolution's evaluation version in October 2005. We had an idea that we knew was easy to implement with the right development tool, and we didn't want to get into the hassle of low level C coding needed to take care of windows, menus, memory, etc. That idea is our current "Slide & Stack" game.

We were lucky to find Runtime Revolution because it was exactly the kind of development tool we needed, and then we found it had much more for us. Since the very beginning, we were able to see results. Coding, testing and compiling were so simple that we decided to keep on learning and improving the game. Eventually, more game ideas came to the pipeline and we walked an easy learning curve, designing, developing and converting those ideas into commercial products.

Our latest product is a simulation of the classical Dominoes board game. For this particular development, we were well prepared. We started researching the game, exploring different implementations, dividing the work into several tasks and hiring specialized companies for the tiles graphic design and intro sound.

We wanted the player to get a more real experience compared to other computer Dominoes games. For this, we decided the player should interact with floating tiles, independent from the game table. This was easily implemented with substacks, but the hard part was coding the tile manipulation because we wanted to offer the ability to rotate a tile while grabbing it by means of recognizing the mouse stroke. It ended up as an option we call “Inertia Effect” thanks to the mouse related message handlers in Revolution.

Another challenge we faced was the tile positioning on the table. We found that other Dominoes games were limited by directional constraints and window borders. We wanted our game to offer freedom of direction and space, and fortunately, we were able to implement both. Finally, online gaming was a must, so we decided to improve our actual engine, developing a new Chat window and player status control.

We have learned a great deal, not only from Revolution but also from the game industry and our customers. Today, baKno has five different games that appeal to people of all ages from all over the world. All of our games have been developed with Runtime Revolution and we intend to keep it as our main development tool.

baKno is currently looking for talented game programmers who want to publish their Revolution work with us at www.bakno.com . For more information, please contact Andres Martinez at andres@bakno.com .