End3r's Corner: personal blog of Andrzej Mazur.
After my talk at the RejectJS conference about Firefox OS and HTML5 games in which I showed Captain Rogers being ported to the Mozilla mobile operating system I thought I'll spend the rest of the month being an attendee at onGameStart and chill out with my friends. But in the meantime there was another event on the way.
So there was a week in Berlin that was fully packed with front-end events: RejectJS, CSSConf.eu and JSConf.eu. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first one - it was a satellite event before the main JSConf.eu event. There was also a lot of parties around to integrate with the community.
It's less than a month to the next edition of the first and the best HTML5 game development conference on the planet - onGameStart 2013. There's also a contest where you can win one of the three tickets worth 79 Euro each!
I wanted to try Clay.io platform for some time now and fortunately I found some free time to tinker with it after finishing my HTML5 mobile game Captain Rogers. I decided to see if the API is so easy to implement. I have to admit that it’s great – there are high quality docs which helps you a lot when working on implementing it.
Here’s the spontaneous work I did today, a single page targeted especially for the new HTML5 game developers that are looking for a list of places they should visit to start and to be up-to-date with HTML5 game development:
As you may already figured out I'm lately more into HTML5 mobile games rather than front-end development. That's why Enclave Games was born - it is an Indie Game Development studio focused on mobile HTML5 games. It's one-man-army for now, I'll focus on mobile HTML5 games for some time and see what happens.
As you may already know we’ve launched our first HTML5 mobile game called Captain Rogers. It was optimized and prepared for the Firefox OS devices (I’ve got one after the App Workshops thanks to Mozilla!) and published in the Firefox Marketplace. The main focus will be put on that platform and the ecosystem. There are only days left till the official launch, so it should be interesting. The first commercial Firefox OS devices were announced today and will be available very soon.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the Web-5 conference in Béziers on June 14th about Firefox OS and HTML5 games - here are my quick notes about that event. I really enjoyed it, spent few lovely days in sunny France and met a lot of interesting people!
Time to start blogging! As you can see it’s just the bare minimum – an Octopress instance with the Classic Light theme. I wanted to have this blog prettier, but hell – too many times I didn’t start something because it wasn’t 100% ready and after some time it died and never saw the light. So here I am, braking my own rules, having “just the basics”. You can say whatever you like, I’m just going to focus on the content and hopefully at some point I’ll have a shiny, original and beautiful blog with everything just as I wanted.
The Firefox OS will be the second revolution by Mozilla, it will impact the mobile market dominated by iOS and Android the similar way it crushed IE6 ten years ago and changed the way we perceive the web. If you're a front-end developer and want to try your luck with mobile apps there's no better way than by diving in into familiar environment - all of the development for Firefox OS is done by using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The guys from Clay.io (supporters of the first js13kGames competition) have started their own compo for students that are (or want to be) also an HTML5 game developers. There's over $10,000 in prizes, so it's a good idea to check it out, learn making games and actually finish one.
The Few is an upcoming game from the famous Blackmoon Design - they've prepared graphic designs for onGameStart, Wizard Quest and many more. They're now working on an impressive project - one will have a chance to lead the Royal Air Force pilots in this RTS game during the World War II in the Battle of Britain.
In about ten days the first and biggest HTML5 games conference will travel from Poland across the ocean and visit USA. The good news? Ticket price dropped to zero, null, nada. If you're around New York on March 15th and love making HTML5 games it's the best place to be. Come join us (I'll be there), meet awesome people and have fun!
Last weekend was full of the game development goodness - I've organized Warsaw Game Jam, the first edition of the Global Game Jam. Thanks to our amazing sponsors - Mozilla and GitHub, we could provide cozy place with good Wi-Fi, food and drinks (mostly beer and pizza) for everybody during the whole weekend. It wasn't only the Game Jam itself, but we were working hard for the Mozilla Game On competition and thinking about fulfilling One Game a Month at the same time. On sunday evening we even had a meet.js meetup with some guys from the Firefox OS team!
Yesterday my article about CSS Selectors Level 4 was finally published on Smashing Magazine's Coding section - you can go there right away and read it. I just wanted to add a few words about the writing process.
In the next three weeks, on January 25th-27th there will be a Global Game Jam - 48h coding marathon for game developers. I'm organizing the Warsaw Game Jam, and there will be three events during one weekend: Global Game Jam mentioned earlier, Mozilla Game On competition and an initiative called One Game a Month. If you're near Warsaw on that weekend come join us!