I spoke at the Twin Cities, Minnesota chapter of the International Game Developers Association on Wednesday, June 8 about the current state of making games with JavaScript and HTML5. Here are my slides.
Update: Now with 100% more video. I start about 44 minutes in.
I recently participated in the 20th Ludum Dare, a competition to make a brand new game from scratch in 48 hours, going solo!
The theme for the competition was from Zelda and internet Kitten meme fame: "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." I made an old school, top-down puzzle game for this theme. After the 48 hour competition ended, I polished my game a bit and also re-submitted to the 72 hour Jam.
You should play both versions of my game!
I've also written a postmortem for the Ludum Dare site, that I invite you to read.
I've finished a level of my Run N' Gun video game that I have been working on for the Experimental Gameplay Project theme: "Cheap Clone." I have been evaluating the Akihabara HTML5 game engine in the process of making this level.
I present to you "Commander Clone 0.2 - Training Mission" — you should play it right now!
If you don't like something about it, please tell me! If you really love something about it, please invite your friends to play.
There are still some bugs, and this training mission level doesn't have a ton of content... but it has been fun to draw the sprites and modify Akihabara. I also like to think the level has a certain charms. ;)
So I've been hacking on the Akihabara HTML5 video game engine. I'm trying it out while I put together a platformer. I think I've come to an answer for the question, "Why does Mario have a wide stance?" Being from Minneapolis, MN I've heard my fair share of wide stance jokes (thanks Larry Craig) … in this video I talk about video game sprites with wide stances and why that is important for platformers. I also discuss how I applied this new knowledge to some code improvements in Akihabara.
I'm sorry to have recorded you such a long video, I didn't have time to record a shorter one. ;)
I revisited my 3D CSS3 Galaxy from my previous post and rewrote the effect in JavaScript that renders using HTML5's canvas tag (instead of Safari-only 3D CSS3 transforms).
This time it works in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and yes even IE9! Oh, it still works on the iPad and iPhone, too. Well, go on then, give it a whirl:
I updated the galaxy a bit, adding an effect where it cycles from blue stars to orange stars as it rotates.
Another fun fact about this demo, is that I was quite easily able to squeeze the entire thing into a single file well under 10KB in size for An Event Apart's 10K contest.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy. Check out the source code!