Because anagrams of the author's name make for good blog titles

Heading out to my fifth Game Developers Conference

February 26, 2011

Tomorrow morning I’m once again flying to San Francisco for another week-long, life-changing experience that will be called the “Game Developers Conference”. It will be my fifth GDC, yet in some ways I feel very strongly that it will be another “first GDC” for me in the sense that I feel I’ve started a radically new era in my life. I actually do the things I talk about, even the stuff I consider to be crazy-awesome like community building and making games on a regular basis with with friends new and old.

In Boston Game Jams I have a strong focal point for my personal work. It gives me a central fire around which all my other passions can burn. This in turn gives me a hook for showing my passion in what I talk about and helps me explain who I am to new people whom I meet at GDC.

I hope this will make it easeir to form and develop meaningful connections with people at GDC this year. The main reason I go to GDC (and I’m sure I speak for many others in saying this) is to meet really creative, open-minded, and motivated people who will inspire me to stay in the driver’s seat on my journey through life and with whom I can share my own inspiration.

In a way, this is the first GDC where I feel confident that I can give back to others as much as they can give to me (at least individually). I’m really looking forward to a finding out how that affects my GDC experience. I suspect this may be an important part of this new era in my life, and I approach San Francisco with open arms and the intent to embrance the unknown wonders that GDC has in store for me (and vice versa) this year.

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Speaking at Boston Indies tonight!

August 16, 2010

Update:
Here are the slides, which I’ve posted on my Boston Game Jams site: HTML5 Game Development with Akihabara

I’m presenting Akihabara and a quick tech overview of HTML5 technology (as it relates to game development) at the August Boston Indies meetup tonight at the Asgard in Central Square, Cambridge, MA (starting at 7pm, in the back room).

When Boston Indies started last summer, I told Scott Macmillan (the event’s coordinator) that I’d love to give a talk at Boston Indies some time when my interests and knowledge set matches well to the interests of the BI crowd. So a few months ago, as Darius and I started learning and using the Akihabara HTML5-based game-engine, we signed up to give a talk about it because we see Akihabara as a good first step for understanding the relevance of HTML5 tech to game developers and because we think Aki can be a great tool for prototyping and game-jamming, which are both strong interests in the Boston indie game-dev scene (as well as great passions of mine).

It’s been quite a challenge putting this presentation together. For one thing, it’s been many years since I’ve given a presentation to peers, so my base confidence level (from familiarity) is somewhat diminished. What’s more, this is the first time I’ve ever presented anything like this to my fellow game-devs. It took a lot of thought revision to (hopefully) find the right level of details at which to show of HTML5 technologies and to find the right balance between focusing on Akihabara and explaining the big picture of HTML5-based games and their development.

I think it’s turning into a pretty good talk, though. My hope is that people will at the minimum be more curious about or open-minded toward the potential of HTML5-based games. With any luck, three or four people will want to know more — a *lot* more — and thus will begin their great trek into the wild world of web-based game development. At the very least, hopefully more folks will consider using Akihabara for their next prototyping project or game jam (possibly this weekend, even).

Pre-show notes

Here are a few pre-show notes, for those of you who can’t make it tonight or like to read up a bit before you hear a talk about a new technology:

HTML5

• HTML5 is a new generation of web standards that are being actively adopted by all major browsers. Many of its features are already available in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
  • IE is trailing behind, but IE9 promises to be a big catch-up, and Google’s ChromeFrame IE extension can be installed by users to make their IE act like Chrome (which has excellent HTML5 support) when a web page says it wants IE to render it like Chrome.
• HTML5 is a combination of new HTML (the core building blocks of web pages), JavaScript (the runtime code that browsers run to add custom dynamic behavior to web pages), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, for visual layout and graphical design)
• Most HTML5 features are focused on allowing rich applications that run through native browser features alone: no plugins needed!
• A few key features:
  • Offline support (advanced caching, local database storage, and more)
  • Advanced CSS allowing for rich graphical styling without an over-abundance of graphics, which allows for rich graphical display via HTML tech, even on modern mobile devices
  • Canvas: a 2D drawing plane that allows for arbitrary graphics to be drawn quickly, via Javascript
• HTML5 is not supported by a single, large company — it’s more of a social contract
• HTML5 canvas element (which drives Akihabara — more on that below) works on:
  • Desktop: Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera
  • Mobile devices with webkit-based mobile browsers, such as Android and iPhone
• Read more (and play!):
  • Here’s a great presentation (built solely on HTML5 tech, no less): slides.html5rocks.com/
  • The overall-coolest site I’ve found to learn about and play with HTML5 technology is www.html5rocks.com/

Akihabara

• Akihabara is an all-Javascript game engine that uses the aforementioned HTML5 canvas element to draw 2D games
• Key features:
  • Animation, based on sprites
  • Simple image spriting – efficient for loading
  • Sound
  • Camera control (great for easy scrolling implementation)
  • Super-simple ASCII-based mapping
  • Simple image spriting
  • Animation, based on sprites
• Akihabara runs on all browsers with HTML5 canvas support, as listed above
• Read more (and play!)
  • Akihabara homepage (includes links to demos)
  • Akihabara beginners’ tutorial, written by me and Darius Kazemi

Want more?

I’ll provide more context and some discrete examples and demos of all of this tonight at Boston Indies, and of course, I’ll post an update with a link to the slides after the talk, probably tomorrow morning. It also occurs to me that it’s about time I start writing about HTML5 technology and game development on this blog, since it’s something I’ve been doing a lot of work with lately. So ping me if you don’t see more of that anytime soon.

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Immigration Jam!

August 4, 2010

I’m throwing a game jam with Alex Schwartz at the end of this month. We’re calling it the Immigration Jam, as the jam is meant to help raise community support for a good friend of ours’ immigration struggle.

We’ve seen a lot of excitement for the jam already from friends and other members of the local game-dev/hacker/artist community, so we’re looking forward to a great event. You can sign up here, if you’re interested in joining us. Anyone who’d like to try making a game from start to finish in a little over a day is welcome to come. Learners and beginners are most welcome!  =)

Read more about the event on its official page or in the original announcement email on the (relatively) new Boston Game Jams website.

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Check-in on what I’ve been up to

DINO Jam this weekend

GDC 2010

My blog, re-birthed – Welcome to Arty Ponderer!

Migrating from Blogger.com to stand-alone WordPress (with a new domain)

Going to GDC 2010!

More AngelXNA (documentation) to Come