All Articles

Enclave Games Monthly Report: April 2014

It’s the beginning of May so it’s time for the next monthly report – April. I still think I’m developing games way too slow, but I’m trying to work on that.

Writing

Finally, the HTML5 Game Development Insights book was published by Apress and is available at Amazon – feel free to grab one! I’m so happy I could take part in it, there are so many great developers sharing their knowledge and experience. I wrote the Playing around with the Gamepad API chapter which uses the Hungry Fridge game demo as an example. Some of the authors did get their copies of the book already while I’m still waiting for mine.

Games

The neverending story named Monster Wants Candy was technically, finally finished – there’s still some work to be done, but let’s say it’s not game developing but bug fixing, for the sake of the project. I originally wanted to have it finished in January… I’m bad at focusing on games and finishing them quickly, there are just so many things I’d love to work on too.

I also took part in the Ludum Dare for the first time, though it was a Jam and I started very late (Sunday night). Ewa was working on a game concept for for some time now and it fit perfectly into the “Beneath the surface” theme, so I decided to use it – the name of the game is Full Immersion and you control a submarine diving in for the treasure. The Jam entry is still very buggy and almost unplayable, but as a game prototype created in one day works quite good.

Events

There’s a plan to run some workshops teaching people how to start developing HTML5 games, it was even mentioned by Przemek in his article at Bushido Games. There are also other teaching opportunities, but this one have the biggest chance of success.

On April 11th I was traveling from Warsaw to Siedlce to speak at the IGK about Firefox OS and HTML5 games, and then get back to Warsaw and travel to Łódź for the Aviary.pl (Polish translation team of the Mozilla products) weekend meeting the same day evening. Other than that I was focusing more on the development and wasn’t going to any other conferences.

Other

I started to include sponsored content (articles and videos) from Spil Games in the Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter, it’s one of the small earnings I want to build, because it’s not easy as an independent developer to get enough money when focusing on open source projects and sharing the knowledge for free. I also included the Donate buttons in some of the projects, though I don’t think it will work much.

Plans for the next month

I’m going to give a lightning talk at the Front-Trends conference that will take place in Warsaw on May 7th-9th. Other than that I’ll try to focus more on making games and will see how the gamedev workshop topic will go.