End3r's Corner: personal blog of Andrzej Mazur.
After missing out on Mozilla's All Hands in Hawaii and San Francisco (although I was at GDC 2017 a few months earlier), I was invited to Austin in Texas (planned to be Cancun in Mexico, but was moved because of the earthquakes), and was super excited to meet the 'new' Emerging Technologies team.
Let's quickly summarize two conferences that happened in Warsaw recently: Code Europe on December 7th and GDG DevFest on December 9th. Both events were confirmed very late and both happened just before I flew to Austin for Mozilla's All Hands.
This monthly report is delayed three weeks - it shows how busy my schedule was. There still was a lot of work with the js13kGames competition, but at least it's finally getting to an end. Also, the last Gamedev.js Warsaw meetup this year happened.
Last meetup this year was held on Tuesday, November 28th in the same place as usual. It was also the very first one I haven't led personally, because I had laryngitis and couldn't say a word.
Please give a warm welcome to Santa's bravest helper who's in trouble just before Christmas and have to escape the flood by building up the tower from the available presents.
The Gamedev.js YouTube channel reached 100 subscribers, so I was able to finally change the channel's url to a memorable one instead of a random string, and the Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter reached 200 issues, so I decided it's a good excuse to do a little review of other Gamedev.js-related numbers.
Even though the js13kGames competition ended, there's still plenty of work to be done. I did manage to do some other things in the meantime though.
After I gave a talk about A-Frame at the Warsaw IT Days in April this year I was asked to give a similar talk, but for the students of the Academy of Fine Arts.
The last regular meetup happened in June, and then during vacations we had a special js13kGames Launch Party event. After the break we've returned with Gamedev.js Warsaw meetups in October.
I rarely do client work, but if a friend is recommending someone, I can at least talk about the details. It worked a year ago with Scooby-Do, and also this time with KFC.
More than a week ago I was speaking at the Game Industry Conference that was held during the Poznań Game Arena on October 5-8th 2017 in Poznań, Poland.
More js13kGames. No, seriously. The tension was slowly growing in May, preparations were intense in June, then July was crazy busy, August at least had a few articles published, and in September the compo hit the roof with the number of submitted entries.
Meet.js, originally started by Damian Wielgosik, are local JavaScript meetups organized by the community and happening across the country. Meet.js Summit is a community-driven, more or less yearly gathering in the form of the full-blown conference.
Last month's report will be about... yeah, the exact same thing as the previous couple of months: js13kGames. At least this time I have a few resources and blog posts to share.
We did something brand new this year - organized launch party for the js13kGames competition, as part of the Gamedev.js meetups in Warsaw.
Remember 97,3% of the last monthly report for June was about js13kGames? Well guess what - it's similar this month too. The amount of preparations needed is insane for a single person, I didn't even have the time to post anything for the past month.
Most of the time was spent on preparations for the js13kGames competition, 2017 edition. The compo starts in the middle of August, and needs a whole lot of time to make it work.
After having the Mozilla Developer Roadshow in May, the Gamedev.js meetups returned to the regular place, Crux. During the sixth meetup happening in June we had something brand new - Gamedev.js Showcase, a way to show your games to the rest of the community.
May was a busy month for all kinds of Gamedev.js events in Warsaw - from a workshop, through hackathon, to a special edition of the meetup.
Instead of our usual Gamedev.js Warsaw #5 meetup this time we had a special one - Mozilla Developer Roadshow with Gamedev.js organized together with Mozilla and the Front-Trends conference and held in English (instead of Polish).
We had a very busy weekend a week ago - during Gamedev.js Weekend we've organized a workshop and a hackathon, both about HTML5 games, and I think it went very good.
I've finally made it - finished Flood Escape. There's other stuff in this monthly report, but you can absolutely ignore it, because I really finished Flood Escape this time.
We really wanted to participate in the Global Game Jam 2017 that was held in January - it was the first time with our baby girl Kasia, who was born a year ago.
Our fourth meetup was organized a few days ago - we met at the same place as usual on Thursday, April 20th. The talks we had were quite original this time.
I was invited to be one of the mentors at the Zdrowieton - a JavaScript hackathon focusing on the health and civilization issues. Obviously, I took the mentorship over the HTML5 games category.
Apart from the massive jet lag after GDC we are still being constantly sick, which is starting to get annoying. I haven't counted my productive hours in March as it would be too depressing to know.
I was invited by Maciej Matyka to visit his students at the University of Wrocław on March 30th and introduce my workshop about building HTML5 games with Phaser.
I'm getting used to giving two talks at a single conference - it was the case with my recent WebVR and Wizard Quest talks during Warszawskie Dni Informatyki (Warsaw IT Days).
We had our third monthly Gamedev.js meetup in Warsaw on Wednesday, March 22nd - it went even better than expected.
February was a little bit crazy - we were sick most of the time while trying to finish the Flood Escape game before my travel to San Francisco for GDC. It didn't work.
I was invited by the Mozilla's Developer Relations team to help with their presence at the Game Developers Conference and related events happening in San Francisco.
Our second Gamedev.js meetup was moved to the new location - Hoża 51, and we liked it so much that we're gonna stay there for longer.
Monthly report for January is here, although way later than it should be - check out what happened during that month.
We've started monthly Gamedev.js meetups in Warsaw - it's a great opportunity to gather local HTML5 game development community in one place.
I've teamed up with the BLUR folks to help them find HTML5 game developers eager to try the new messaging app that is also a platform to promote indie games.
Last Wednesday, on January 11th I had the chance to speak at the WarsawJS meetup that moved to a new place - Warsaw Spire. I decided to talk about Wizard Quest as this story is very well received lately.
The year 2016 is already over, so let's see how it went. Was it bad? Better than 2015? Good? See for yourself.
As you can imagine in December I wasn't too active because of the inevitable Christmas time - I mostly focused on answering emails to not be swamped by them too much.
In my Gamasutra article I hate Wizard Quest I've mentioned I'll bury the source code of this game someplace deep and forget about it for at least an eternity, but the feedback was so positive I decided to update it a bit after the release. Plus there was some security issues I had to take care of.