Last chance to rate games for GameOn 2010

Go to the game gallery, and log in. You’ll get a selection of five random games and be asked to play and rate each one. The rating period has been extended to February 1 — that’s tomorrow — so this is your last chance. Of course, the gallery will still be up after tomorrow.

Have fun!

 

Game On 2010 – The collected Labs Night gaming videos

Here’s a YouTube playlist featuring the collected talks from the Labs Night Gaming events in both Mountain View and London. Together, they include plenty of tips, techniques, and inspiration to help you finish your Game On 2010 contest entry!

 

Game On 2010 – a preview of my HTML 5 webapp, Pencilbox

Hey, Game On 2010 contest participants — how are those HTML 5 games coming along? I can’t wait for January 2010 when I can finally see what you’ve made.

I’ve been doing some HTML 5 experimentation of my own. What I’m working on is not a game, but it is a graphical HTML 5 webapp that uses several tricks that may be of interest to game developers. It’s easier to show it in action than to tell you about it, so watch this video (hosted on Vimeo since WordPress won’t let me embed) for a preview of Pencilbox and an explanation of how it works.

Note: this is not a Mozilla project — this is a personal project I’ve been hacking on in my free time.

I’m not yet ready to put the app itself on a public webserver where you can play with it, nor have I set up a public code repository yet. (Like I said, it’s a side project, so I haven’t had time to work on the infrastructure stuff.) When I do have it set up properly, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s a tarball of the source code, which is under a Mozilla tri-license. It may be of some interest if you wish to achieve a similar effect in your Game On 2010 submission and you want to see how I did it.

Happy hacking!

 

Game On 2010, Example Code: Multitouch Gestures

While my previous code example showed how to recreate the past, this next example points out the possibilities of the future — Multitouch gesture interfaces, on the web!

The UI designer in me is chafing at the bit to start giving people web-apps with multitouch-based interfaces. The possibilities are enormous, and the advantages of multitouch UI – rich input, direct manipulation, natural mappings, fewer widgets, instant feedback, and a certain fun factor – are many.

But unfortunately, since this is still an emerging technology, it’s not exactly a standard yet. It’s not available on all hardware. On hardware where it is available, it’s not always made available through the browser. Different browsers expose multitouch events to web content in different ways, if they expose them at all. For this reason, the demo I’m about to show you won’t work on all browsers, sadly. So far, I’ve only been able to make it work using the Firefox 4 beta and only on multitouch-enabled computers running Windows 7 – which drastically limits the audience that will be able to try out this demo, I’m afraid.

So, I’m sorry to give you a demo that’s not fully cross-browser-compatible or standards-compliant. But! I think multitouch will become standardized, and soon. It won’t be too many more years before multitouch input becomes an everyday part of the Web experience on all platforms. So why not start experimenting with it now? We can start trying out new interface possibilities now, and work towards full cross-browser compatibility as the standards emerge.

And what better forum for experimenting with interface possibilities than the Game On 2010 contest?

Anyway, here’s the demo:

Multitouch Gesture Interpretation Demo

 

Moz Labs Night – Web Gaming Edition

If you’re at all interested in writing games for the web, and if you’ll be in or near Mountain View next Thursday (October 28), then you — yes, you! — are invited to the Labs Night Gaming event at Mozilla. There should be a lot of cool game demos; I’ll be showing off some multitouch input stuff I’ve been working on; and there’s free pizza. It should be a real good time, and a chance to network with other people who are excited about the Web as a gaming platform.

 

Game On 2010, Example Code: Old-School RPG Map

Mozilla Labs has announced Game On 2010, our first-ever game development contest.

To support Game On 2010, I’ve been working on some sample code that demonstrates how to accomplish common game programming techniques using only open Web standards and no plug-ins. For those who are thinking about entering but don’t know where to get started developing a game engine in HTML and Javascript, read on.

My first example is a set of classes for implementing a top-down, tile-based map screen that scrolls to follow the player’s movement. If you, like me, wasted your youth playing 8-bit and 16-bit console RPGs (like Dragon Warrior, Ultima, and my favorite under-appreciated classic: Phantasy Star) then this ought to look a bit familiar:

Old-School RPG Map Demo

Move the character around with the arrow keys, and notice how the screen scrolls when you get close to the edge.