Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Game development, HTML5, iOS and Javascript.

If you made an HTML5 game, sooner or later you will want to port it to mobile devices, not just as a web app, but as a native app.

Adobe PhoneGap allows you to do in no time for free, without even installing anything on your computer, thanks to its cloud service.

Let’s have a look at it.

PhoneGap is a free and open source framework that allows you to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can have it installed and running on your computer, or you can try the free but upgradable cloud service which takes the pain out of compiling PhoneGap apps and maintaining native SDKs.

I am going to test the service with BWBan game made with PuzzleScript with the jQuery virtual pad I made.

In order to use the free cloud service, you need to upload your project to GitHub.

I’ll guide you through this process in case you don’t know how to configure it.

Once you register to GitHub, you have to create a new repository from this page, click on repository tab and “New” button.

Then just enter the name of the repository, don’t touch anything else and click on “Create repository” button.

That is. Now your GitHub repository is ready to be used from PhoneGap. Now it’s time to add contents. You will need to download a Git client, I suggest this one.

Open Git Bash, basically a text propmpt, and enter the following commands to upload your previously compiled PuzzleScript game.

And we are done with Git too. Now, head to PhoneGap and choose to try the cloud compiler

Choose the free plan as we are only testing the service. It will require a GitHub repo, and that’s why we did it.

Enter the pah of the .git file you just created from the Git Bash…

… and let it fetch the repository.

At this time give your project a name, a description and click on “Ready to build” button.

You’ll probably run into some errors because you did not upload certificates for some builds. Click on the name of your project

Here is where you can upload keys and certificates. If you don’t know how to get them, read my post Creation of an iPhone App with Flash and without a Mac (for all Windows lovers) and upload them.

Finally, here is my working PuzzleScript game running on my iPhone 5. If you don’t know how to install an app to your iPhone, you can still check the post Creation of an iPhone App with Flash and without a Mac (for all Windows lovers).

As you can see, there’s still something to do… the game has no custom icon, no custom splash screen and the status bar is visible. I’ll show you how to fix it next week.