Seth Ladd's Blog

Aloha! We want YOU to speak at the newly announced  New Game, the conference for HTML5 game developers , held Nov 1-2, 2011 in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Who can speak? Anyone building HTML5 games today, or who is connected in some way with making the web the best game platform out there.  If you are passionate about browser based gaming, we want to hear your story! How do I submit my proposal? Simply fill out  http://goo.gl/iWA2J What's the deadline? All proposals must be submitted by August 1 at midnight PDT. What are potential topics? * debriefs from HTML5 game projects and launches * feature detection (gauging performance of underlying client machine in order to scale application experience) * commerce and issues around billing/DRM/protecting source assets from theft/modding/cheating * debugging/performance profiling tools and how to navigate this new space (anything from JS profiling to things like measuring GPU counters t

I asked the question "Who (not what) do you think of when I say HTML5 Games?"  Here's what I heard, and here's who you should follow and watch.  This group is leading the way for HTML5 games. @robhawkes  - now works at Mozilla, developer of Rawkets , a multi-player HTML5 game; author of HTML5 Canvas book @phoboslab  - developer of the Impact game engine for JavaScript and HTML5 @LostDecadeGames  - developers of Onslaught @hiive  - ported his iOS game Creatures and Castles over to HTML5, now in the Chrome Web Store @SubsonicGames  - building a full WebGL game; great developer diary blog @Vincent_Scheib  - Chrome engineer, working on adding features to the platform like Mouse Lock @lillithompson  - Chrome Developer Advocate for Games @hakimel  - general awesome HTML5 engineer, wrote Sinuous , an early and very popular HTML5 game @ggoodale  - developer on Word2 , an HTML5 massively multiplayer tile based word forming game @erikjmoller  - Opera core developer

We love HTML5 games, and we love helping developers build HTML5 games.  One popular and fun format for learning HTML5 games is the Game Jam.  A Game Jam is like a hackathon for game developers.  Think food, laptops, snacks, and lots and lots of hacking.  In the end, each team will demo their game and there are usually prizes for "crowd favorite" or "technical achievement". After running a few Game Jams, we've collected some best practices and tips to make your next Game Jam a success.  Big props to Vince Scheib and Mike Mahemoff for providing these tips. - Publicize frameworks in advance and encourage attendees to come with 'hello world' games already under their belt so they can hit the ground running. Possibly include a super simple template of our own that isn't a 'framework', but just a tiny simple example. - Publicize easy / free tools for e.g. audio & 2D drawing. - Publicize source control and encourage teams to already k