What gives? I'm not too amazed - what is this, and why the name?
Amazed began in 2012 as a personal project to implement a simple game engine and a maze-tracing type game (A Maze.d) on Android. The effort was unique in that everything was hand coded - no engines, platforms, or frameworks (besides Android), even most of the graphics and effects were generated purely through code. 8 levels with over 100 boards were developed (by building and using a custom board editor and difficulty analyzer). Original music, loops and sound was produced by Van Saarland, which was an awesome mix of electronica, ambient techno, and industrial. The logo and a number of interface designs were produced by Tony Maligno. Unfortunately with a bunch of other priorities happening at the time, I abandoned the game before finalizing or ever releasing it. By the time I revisited it, so much had already changed in the mobile (Android) landscape. However, there was still a lot of great code and some nice effect engines I developed, which I didn't want to go to waste. Two of the Live Wallpapers were the first assets which were fully developed (back in 2013) and have been running on a number of personal Android devices for years (and unofficially on some big box store demos). In late 2016, to reignite the project, I decided to port some of the game effects from Android Java code to HTML/Javascript/CSS (ie. this web site). The effort resulted in fresh energy, a few new ideas, and the effects matured and became more refined (particularly hex and warp).