Enclave Games Monthly report: March 2014

I decided to close as many active projects as possible in March. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to close them all, only a few, but I can still focus on that in April. Let’s see how the March report look like:

Writing

My Gamepad API chapter in the Apress book HTML5 Game Development Insights was finally closed and I’m just waiting for the publication. Article about the development of Craigen called Building HTML5 games for Firefox OS was published on the mobiForge website. I’m still trying to get some free time to finish the Phaser tutorial – quite a challenge if you know that there’s 4000 words to review. I was able to write quick summary at MDN called Introduction to HTML5 Game Development with Phaser and the Device Orientation API with the Cyber Orb demo game as an example created during the MDN Work Weekend. I’m gonna finish the game first and then polish the article a bit.

Games

The game Monster Wants Candy is like 95% done, but I couldn’t finish it before my private deadline which was the end of March. That’s a failure, obviously. I’m gonna focus on that, hopefully it’s a matter of few days of development and testing. I’ll start working on the Wizard Quest after I finish Monster Wants Candy. The other two games are also on the list: Hungry Fridge (for way too long) and Cyber Orb (new one). In March I spent some time integrating the branding API into Craigen and fixing some minor bugs for the devices I didn’t even have. That was fun.

Competitions

I organized a quick contest on my Polish blog: you had the chance to win Alcatel One Touch Fire with Firefox OS and the js13kGames t-shirt. I’m gonna announce the winners really soon.

Events

The MDN Work Weekend in Paris was a great event – I’ve created Cyber Orb demo with the Device Orientation API and wrote about the process on MDN. I even summarized my experience in this post at Mozilla blog. I was speaking at meet.js Warsaw (in English) and Warsaw IT Days (in Polish) – the second one was held at the university and I did get awesome feedback from the students interested in game development and Firefox OS in general.

Other

The Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter reached 1000 subscribers, which is very nice. The growth almost stopped, so I have to figure out new places and new ways to advertise it and keep the flow of new subscribers going. Of course, as all of my projects, with zero budget. Having the info posted on DailyJS helped a lot, do you know any similar places? Let me know if you do!

Plans for the next month

Finish the started games, silly. The Phaser tutorial is also waiting way too long to be finished. I’d like to work on preparing the workshops – I’m not even sure yet if they will happen. First one is about HTML5 game dev basics (Breakout game on Canvas), the second one would be a bigger event (few cities in Poland) about HTML5 game development with Phaser (Hungry Fridge or Cyber Orb may or may not be used as an example). I’m also thinking (for some time now) about starting to sell the js13kGames t-shirt designs from previous years.