My game demo for Mozilla Festival 2011

I’ll be in London from Thursday to Monday presenting on HTML 5 game development at the Mozilla Festival.

I’ve been working on an HTML 5 side-scroller, as yet unnamed. The plan is to have the game skeleton pretty solid before my session, and then have participants in the session hack on it, add features to it, and flesh it out. That way the participants can get to work on the fun parts of game development, like creating monsters and power-ups, instead of spending the whole session setting up boilerplate code and debugging their event handlers.

The code for the game is on GitHub and there is a playable version hosted on my site. It uses BrowserID for the login. You can give it a try right now — log in and try making a level with the level editor, or play one of the existing levels and try to beat the best time! If you find bugs, please report them in GitHub. Thanks!

 

Web-based piano made possible by <Audio> tag

For a lark, I hacked together a quick web-based piano keyboard using the <Audio> tag. The Audio tag (along with the Video tag) is part of HTML version 5, and it’s pretty cool, since it makes the audio file just another part of the HTML page rather than something that is stuck in a plug-in ghetto. That means that javascript running in the page can interact with the audio file, which is what makes this piano possible to do without Flash.

The audio files are pure sine waves (e.g. the A above middle C is 440 Hz) generated by Audacity and saved in .ogg format (an open-source encoding).

Unfortunately it will only work in a browser that supports HTML 5 the Audio tag, which as of right now is pretty much only (shameless plug) Firefox 3.5.

August 28, 2009: EDITED TO ADD: The web-based piano has been moved to evilbrainjono.net/music, where I am working on integrating it into a full web-based music composition lab.