End3r's Corner

meet.js Summit 2026

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last week, on March 4th, the 15th anniversary edition of the meet.js Summit was happening in Warsaw - I was attending the conference and representing the Gamedev.js community.

It wasn’t actually the 15th edition of the Summit itself as it didn’t happen every single year, but it’s been 15 years of the meet.js meetups here in Poland, so still quite the achievement.

I’m part of that history too: my very first talk was at the meet.js Warsaw #3 meetup that happened November 2011, then my very first conference talk was at the meet.js Summit 2012 in Poznań. I then gave multiple talks at various meet.js meetups and conferences, co-organized local events, and we even made a few meetups together as part of the meet.js and Gamedev.js collaboration.

Fast forward to 2026 and I’m at the SGH building, meeting many friends I haven’t seen in years, since Gamedev.js meetups in Poland ended with the start of the pandemic in 2020 and I haven’t been active in the conference space since. I didn’t plan to listen to the talks much as I’m into web game development rather than front-end, but the schedule was AI-heavy, so I found myself listening to a few presentations eventually.

Given the Gamedev.js and meet.js partnership, we (as in the Gamedev.js community) had a Hallway Track slot around 11:00 that Zbyszek, main organizer, anounced casually during his intro speech. I had the chance to stand up and wave to the whole audience, and then had some cool conversations during the actual slot around the lobby.

The sad part of the event almost noone know is that I was offered to build a web game promoting the conference itself, just like I did years ago for 2011-2012 conferences I was attending in Poland. I had too many tasks on my plate trying to catch up though, so didn’t even manage to start thinking about implementing this.

Next year’s not going to be an anniversary, but I’m going to try building something for the Summit anyway, hopefully it’ll work this time!

I went all-in into Warhammer

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2025, the same year I achieved so much around Neuroshima Hex, I also dived deep into Warhammer and went through a few different settings in the span of twelve months: from Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40 000, to The Old World, Kill Team, and even Necromunda.

It all started because of Michał, who introduced us to Age of Sigmar - I was more into Warhammer 40k lore-wise, but had zero actual experience, so decided to tag along.

Age of Sigmar

If you don’t know, Age of Sigmar is more like medieval fantasy compared to the dark science fiction of the 40k world. I was looking for a suitable faction when I found out there’s actually some advanced (given the setting) technology in the form of sky dwarves called Kharadron Overlords.

They do have steampunk style flying ships, plus LOTS of shooting weapons, so I went with it, since this was the only faction at least remotely close to Warhammer 40k. On December 17th 2024 I’ve ordered an Age of Sigmar Kharadron Overlords Spearhead box.

The bigger, “classic” format consists of units that are usually up to 2000 points, while Spearhead is a smaller system with its own simpler rules.

Cool thing is you can collect Spearheads or buy models separately as those units inside the box can add up to your “normal” 1000, 1500, or 2000 points army, they are just cheaper overall in such packages.

I assembled all the models eventually, which took me ages, but somehow I managed. I mean, almost all the models, as the Frigate, the flying ship, had huge ballons (with the Aether gas inside) which had two issues: fully assembled would be difficult to transport, and even more difficult to paint afterwards. I’ve decided to focus on playing with the chasis, leaving gluing and painting for later.

A few weeks after buying the Spearhead box I also went ahead and bought Aether-Khemist and Grundstok Thunderers to start building an army. After a couple of months, in August, the second, new Spearhead came out, so I decided to buy it along with a new terrain (Endrin Dock), a book, and the cards as well.

I got the Ironclad (the biggest ship) from Michał as a gift a couple of months later as well. This is the current list of KO units I have:

Kharadron Overlords: Spearhead (2024)
- Arkanaut Admiral
- Arkanaut Frigate
- Arkanaut Company (x10)
- Skywardens/Endrinriggers (x3)
Aether-Khemist
Grundstok Thunderers (x5)
Kharadron Overlords: Spearhead - Grundstok Trailblazers (2025)
- Endrinmaster with Dirigible Suit
- Grundstok Gunhauler
- Grundstok Thunderers (x5)
- Skywardens/Endrinriggers (x3)
Zontari Endrin Dock
Kharadron Overlords Battletome
Kharadron Overlords Warscroll cards
Arkanaut Ironclad

All those models should add up to a nice 2000 points army. I still have the Dock unopened, second Spearhead just started, the Battletome and cards in mint condition, and the Ironclad box sealed though - one of the things I learned about myself is that I assemble the models veeery slooowly, and it takes A LOT of time to finish.

I did start my painting journey with the Arkanaut Company - I’ve painted all 10 dwarves (took me even longer than cutting out and gluing), but the first 5 models were my experiments to see which shade of green would fit the most. Why green, while their usual color scheme is different?

I had a sentiment for Salamanders (40k Space Marines chapter) from my youth when I first encountered Warhammer, but had noone to play with, so I didn’t even buy any miniatures back then. Now, with our whole party going into Warhammer I decided to paint Kharadron Overlords in Salamander green.

We’ve played a bunch of games, starting from the Spearhead format, going through 500, 750, 1000 points armies, and up to 1500 and even 2000 (with some proxy models) eventually.

I was even able to receive cool objective markers from Playmats where I bought us a terrain mat. They also work as fancy coasters, tested by yours truly.

Warcry

We did use our Age of Sigmar models to play a few Warcry games, which is a format even smaller than Spearhead, since you have a small party and control your models individually. Something like the Kill Team from 40k, but with much simpler rules.

I did use my dwarves for this, but they were really slow, so grabbing objectives on the map was quite difficult. Still, I enjoyed Warcry the few times we played it.

Warhammer 40 000

Since we’ve been exploring Warhammer Age of Sigmar for a couple of months, we ended up looking into 40k eventually as well. When I was doing a research about all the available factions, I decided to look for the similar playstyle (heavy shooting) to Kharadron Overlords. Three factions popped up: Adeptus Mechanicus, T’au Empire, and Leagues of Votann.

Looking at the lore and models themselves I realized Votann are also dwarves. Space ones called Kin, but still. Given the strong similarities in models, their abilities, and the overall look and feel I went for Votann.

Around May I bought myself their Combat Patrol, which is a box with a few units and its own simple rules similar to the Spearhead one for Age of Sigmar.

It originally came out in 2022, so when Games Workshop was releasing second Spearhead for Kharadron Overlords in August, they also released a second Combat Patrol for Leagues of Votann a couple of weeks later, which I obviously bought as well.

Games Workshop did release a whole bunch of new Votann models at that time, but I skipped buying them as I already had plenty of unpacked models. I did buy the Codex rulebook and their datacards along with the second box in August though. The current collection looks like this:

Leagues of Votann: Combat Patrol (2022)
- Kahl
- Hernkyn Pioneers (x3)
- Cthonian Beserks (x5)
- Hearthkyn Warriors (x10)
Leagues of Votann: Combat Patrol (2025)
- Einhyr Champion
- Brokhyr Thunderkyn (x3)
- Einhyr Hearthguard (x5)
- Hearthkyn Warriors (x10)
Leagues of Votann Codex
Leagues of Votann Datasheet cards

Interestingly enough, during that time in August a new Combat Patrol was announced and eventually released: Salamanders! I immediately bought it, and after playing a few Combat Patrol matches (and a league) I switched to Salamanders entirely.

I also decided to paint them before anything else, after the initial experiments with Arkanaut Company in May of course, since those exact Salamanders were suppose to be my painting scheme models for every other army.

Salamanders: Combat Patrol (2025)
- Adrax Agatone
- Invader ATV
- Eradicators (x3)
- Assault Intercessors (x5)
- Infernus Marines (x10)

Because of the Salamanders Combat Patrol, the second one for Votann still sits untouched, but I do plan to collect a full 2000 points Leagues of Votann army eventually. It’s going to be a marathon rather than a sprint though as I’m focusing on smaller formats right now.

Kill Team

This format is different as you control about 5-10 models individually (like in Warcry) instead of leading whole units with multiple models into a full scale battle. Our friend, Paweł, introduced us to Kill Team and I fell in love with it immediately.

After a quick research on the available teams I ended up with… yes, dwarves! Turns out there are two Votann teams: Hearthkyn Salvagers and Hernkyn Yaegirs.

The models of the first one are based on Hearthkyn Warriors, so after buying a dedicated Hearthkyn Salvagers Kill Team box (in July) I could use the remaining Warriors to assemble all the possible weapon options.

Since Michał wasn’t a big fan of Kill Team to say the least, I started looking for options and realized you can play with other folks in dedicated shops which were doing two things at once: selling Games Workshop miniatures and offering gaming space with terrain and everything else needed to play.

I did join two Kill Team leagues with Salvagers at once, played ten matches total, and lost all of them. Barrier of entry was high, opponents were skilled, other teams were better, Salvagers themselves were complicated to play on their own, but I enjoyed every single match and wanted to learn as much as possible.

Around September the new Kill Team came out, Deathwatch, which was suppose to be an elite team, better and tougher than Salvagers, and overall easier to handle, and they did.

Given I already had experience with Kill Team in general, and Deathwatch lore-wise are veterans from various Space Marines chapters, including one Salamander guy, I decided I’m going in and painting them ALL as Salamanders!

Fast forward and after 30-40 matches, multiple leagues and a tournament I’m still losing a lot, but getting the hang of them, playing better with every match, learning their quirks, and still enjoying the process. I found myself the perfect Warhammer system.

The Old World

Michał and Staś were big fans of Warhammer Fantasy, so they ended up focusing on The Old World. Yes, there are dwarves called Dwarfen Mountain Holds, they do have flying machines and lots of guns, are tough and slow, so exactly what you’d expect.

Yes, I did buy a bunch of models around September:

Dwarfen Mountain Holds: Battalion (2024)
- Gyrocopters/Gyrobombers (x2)
- Dwarf Warriors (x32)
- Dwarf Thunderers/Quarrellers (x32)
Cannon and Organ Gun
King with Oathstone
Dwarfen Mountain Holds Arcane Journal

This system seems the furthest from my preference as it does try to recreate grand scale battles with pivoting your units, or artillery scatter, but it’s the only one Michał and Staś are playing right now, so I don’t mind. Plus there’s this newly released Battle March format offering specific rules for 500 point battles, which is a nice entry point.

I’ve played a few of those games, mostly using Kharadron Overlords proxies, as I only assembled a handful of Dwarfen models so far.

It’s still quite difficult for me to grasp all the concepts and remember all the rules, or at least know where to look for their explanations, as it’s all fairly different from Age of Sigmar or 40k, but I enjoyed those few games I had nonetheless.

Necromunda

While exploring Kill Team I learned about Necromunda, which feels like a casual version of that system. You have your gang, just like you have a team, but the extra layer is between battles when you grow their skills from gained experience points, tend to the wounded, try to rescue your folks if any were kidnapped, do side missions, and overall manage the gang to survive as they CAN permanently die if you’re unlucky enough. Seems quite interesting, so I decided to try it…

…using dwarves, obviously. In Necromunda they are called Ironhead Squat Prospectors, or Squats in short. Story-wise they are the distant relatives of Kin from Leagues of Votann. The choice was obvious, since there are no Space Marines like Salamanders available, and Squats are exactly what you’d expect from Warhammer’s dwarves yet again: slow but durable with loads of shooting.

I’m just starting the campaign, so can’t say much, but I’m quite excited. Especially that Kill Team is the system I enjoyed the most so far and Necromunda seems pretty close. It resembles computer games from my childhood I liked playing a lot like Jagged Alliance and Fallout Tactics, and later Wasteland.

JoyToy

As a bonus that is not made by Games Workshop I bought myself a JoyToy figurine: Captain Adrax Agatone. I was looking for Kharadron Overlords models, Leagues of Votann ones, or any other Warhammer dwarves, but couldn’t find any. They did have Salamanders though, so I’ve realized I could’ve started with that in the first place.

Adrax Agatone was re-released around September promoting the Salamanders Combat Patrol which do have a plastic version of him in the box. The toy now sits proudly on my desk between my laptop and the painting station and looks awesome.

Miniature of the month

Official Warhammer stores have miniatures of the month throughout the year: each month you can get a free model, but you have to be quick as they run out of stock literally within minutes. We do have one store in Warsaw, and in September the miniature of the month was a model from Vongrim Harpoon Crew, one of the Kharadron Overlords new boxes. I waited outside in line for about half an hour before the store’s opening on a cold Saturday, but managed to get one myself.

There’s a competition to paint those models, and so I did, but didn’t submit due to the fact that it was unfinished: my paints and materials to make a base arrived after the deadline, and I didn’t want to submit an incomplete project. I did finish the model eventually, though entirely for myself.

The year of Dwarves (and Salamanders)

I was lucky enough to see so many new Games Workshop releases in 2025: new Kharadron Overlords Spearhead, terrain, multiple units, Battletome, and cards, plus a miniature of the month, new Leagues of Votann Combat Patrol, multiple units, Codex, and cards, brand new Salamanders Combat Patrol, and JoyToy figurines.

It was a unique transition when old Spearhead or Combat Patrol was still available for me to buy, but within a couple of months new ones were out already while the old ones were discontinued, so I could have both. I don’t expect any new stuff of any of those armies anytime soon, but that’s totally fine, since I have plenty of boxes stacked up for the coming months.

Matches, leagues, and tournaments

After the first couple of months playing Age of Sigmar with friends, when I got my hands on Votann’s Combat Patrol, I decided to go out of my comfort zone and joined a local Combat Patrol league. The shop, 2d6, is fairly close to my house. Later on I also joined a few Kill Team leagues around Warsaw: in 2d6, but also Xjoy, and Matisoft.

I got confident enough to join a Kill Team tournament where instead of casually playing a match for 3-4 hours, every match had a strict 1,5 hour time limit. We’ve played three matches one after another, and although I was really tired by the end of it, I won one game and enjoyed all three SO MUCH. Plus I learned a lot as well, all the knowledge condensed into one day instead of six weeks, which is the usual time for playing three matches in a league once every two weeks.

What’s more, I liked the concept of playing three games a day to a point that I immediately joined THREE tournaments planned for March, and already reserved my spot in Polish Championship 2026 (luckily it’s open to anyone) in April. I expect nothing more than enjoying Kill Team for full two days and learning even more than during a regular tournament, from the smartest players in the country. If I lose all matches that’s fine, I’m a slow learner, but that is going to be an invaluable experience for the future.

Summary

It was a wild ride from Kharadron Overlords Spearhead, through bigger games, a bit of Warcry, then Warhammer 40k with Leagues of Votann, their Combat Patrol, Salvagers Kill Team, Salamanders Combat Patrol, a bunch of Kharadron Overlords models and another Spearhead, the second Votann Combat Patrol, Deathwatch Kill Team, and now the Squats Necromunda gang. All packed in the twelve months of 2025.

I’m going to focus a lot on Kill Team in the next few months, try Necromunda, and later on slowly work on assembling and painting my remaining models (as Salamanders, obviously). Then I might grow The Old World dwarves army (since I don’t expect we’re going to go back to Age of Sigmar), and build a proper Votann army for bigger games later on. That’s yet to be seen though, and most probably closer to the end of this year the soonest.

As you can see I went really DEEP. Fifteen years of Neuroshima Hex was summarized with a big bang, while Warhammer sneaked in and is going to stay for a bit. I was joking that assembling all the models I have will take me months, but those months passed by and I still have so many boxes left untouched that I won’t run out of things to do for a long time.

It’s not a “pile of shame” if you do plan on working with what you have, so there’s that. Assembling and painting takes me a lot of time, but then again: I don’t expect to be out of Warhammer anytime soon - I could imagine doing that for the next fifteen years. If not though, then I can safely say the time so far was a blast already.

My Neuroshima Hex achievements in 2025

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Last year was quite special as my involvement with the Neuroshima Hex board game was recognized by the game’s creator, Portal Games, in every single published physical piece in 2025. Not to mention judging the Polish Championship and making an appearance in the digital Neuroshima Hex released on Steam as well.

Half-jokingly I can say that running the biggest Neuroshima Hex fan site (Polish and worldwide) at NeuroshimaHex.pl since 2010 finally paid off. I don’t do it often, but I’ll allow myself to brag about what happened in the past twelve months.

Judging Neuroshima Hex Polish Championship

Starting in January, I was at the Neuroshima Hex Polish Championship 2024 organized during Portalcon 25 at Śląski Stadium in Chorzów where I was one of the judges. We’ve hosted more than one hundred of the best players in Poland, every single one had to win their ticket in local qualifications.

I was helping clarify any questions about the rules during the matches, given we have more than twenty Neuroshima Hex armies available and the document listing all the interactions between them is massive.

Neuroshima Hex on Steam

In June the Baked Games team released Neuroshima Hex on Steam for Windows PCs, which I helped promote through NeuroshimaHex.pl - one of the achievements in the game is called “End3r’s Game”.

Fun fact is, the achievement in its current form is awarded for winning 10 games, but the first idea was closer to how the Ender’s Game book ended, when Wiggin had fought the final battle with the Formics near their homeworld, and won by annihilating all his forces to destroy the enemy as well.

The achievement was suppose to be granted for winning the game by destroying all the units on the board, both your own and your opponent’s, but it turned out to be too difficult to execute, so Baked Games settled with something more… achievable.

Neuroshima Hex: Battle

A few months later, in September, the Battle expansion was published - the existence of the NeuroshimaHex.pl fan site was finally recognized, which wasn’t a common case in the past.

Two out of three urls in the Useful Links section at the end of the rulebook were the NeuroshimaHex.pl Discord server and the NeuroshimaHex.pl site itself.

Wiremen

One month after Battle, the Wiremen army expansion was released. I have fond memories about it as a tester. It was my favourite army prototype out of the available few that I’ve been playtesting for a couple of months. I really liked the new mechanic of the Technology tokens that can be used in the outer board ring, the spots that are not used by the Pirates army.

It’s really humbling to see how such a prototype (selected as the best one from 40 fan submissions) evolve over the span of half a year - both in terms of core mechanics, but also lore-wise. You end up with a polished product that resembles the core idea, but so many things are changed in the process.

Anyway, my name landed in the “thank you” section at the end of the printed rulebook added to every box.

Neuroshima Hex (base game)

The year 2025 was important for the Neuroshima Hex brand as it was 20 years since the 1.0 release, and thus the new base game was published. The 3.0 version was out in 2013, and we had the Year of Moloch collector’s edition in 2021, so it was time for something new. It had the same four starter armies, but lots of cool things inside as well.

One of those things was the Map Atlas - eight maps with their own scenarios, specific starting setup and winning conditions. I was part of the small team here in Warsaw that was playtesting those scenarios and helping balance them for the final product.

Not only my name landed in the usual “thank you” spot at the end of the rulebook, but the Useful Links section included NeuroshimaHex.pl Discord, NeuroshimaHex.pl site itself, our Neuroshima Hex Polska group on Facebook, AND my own web application NSHex Counter made as Enclave Games that debuted in 2019 and serves the purpose of the helper app to count Neuroshima Hex tiles, so you don’t need to remember what tokens were used already and what is yet co come.

I was also able to secure one of the two spots for the partnership on the back of the box, so NeuroshimaHex.pl was officially recommending this edition to all potential buyers along with Planszeo.

Four contests

Thanks to Portal Games and Baked Games I’ve organized four contests where you could win both physical and digital prizes:

The one with the new edition of Neuroshima Hex was the most popular in terms of submitted answers in the history of competitions on the site.

Summary

That’s a lot and is definitely not going to be repeated anytime soon, so I’m really happy about how it turned out. Neuroshima Hex is my favourite board game of all time for the past two decades, so being able to be part of every single project in 2025, one way or the other, was extremely rewarding.

That recognition helps me run NeuroshimaHex.pl - regularly write news pieces, add tiles descriptions when new armies are released, review products, publish photoshoots, and everything else needed to keep it alive, sixteen years and still going.

GitHub Universe Recap Warsaw

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The series of local meetups happening all around the world bringing talks that deliver what GitHub Universe 2025 was all about arrived in Warsaw last week.

I was attening GitHub Universe 2025 in San Francisco thanks to being a GitHub Star, but when I learned there will be a recap meetup happening here in Warsaw I decided to join immediately.

It was suppose to be hosted in the Microsoft office, but given the interest was high, to accomodate all the folks the meetup was moved to Norblin Factory event space.

Talks revolved around the announcements from Universe: GitHub Copilot, its product strategy, lessons learned from teams at Asana and Miro using it, some deep dive later on, and wrapped with advanced security at the end.

It was a good mixture talking about the current state and the future of AI in software development.

I met Piotr, Kamil, and Zbyszek once again (after bumping into them at Wawtech 2025 in December), and we took another selfie for posterity.

The food was good, and there was also an opportunity to play Flappy Mona and try to break the record, which was surprisingly quite difficult to do.

Overall I enjoyed my time at the event, had some good conversations, and I’m eager to jump into some web game development with Copilot soon.

WAWTECH 2025

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was invited to join WAWTECH 2025 happening here in Warsaw as part of the Gamedev.js becoming a Community Partner - the conference was hosted at EXPO XXI on December 16th-17th.

There was a small mix up as my ticket was suppose to be Max, but was labeled Media instead, so I didn’t even had access to snacks, but it was quickly fixed and I could enjoy the conference. As part of the partnership I was able to do a small giveaway on our Discord and the winning ticket was claimed by my friend, Piotr.

Venue

EXPO XXI is a huge complex of buildings available for running big conferences, so WAWTECH with roughly 3000 attendees fit perfectly there. We had two halls available: one with the main stage and the partners’ booths area, the other with two smaller stages, workshop area, and food court.

Funny thing was the organizers were saying the parking space is very limited and to pick public transport instead. I was hesitant, but decided to go with my electric car anyway - to my surprise, out of about 1000 spots, when I arrived, I saw… 3 cars total. Mine was fourth. Yup, I parked next to the entrance on an almost empty parking lot.

Drones workshop

I met with Piotr in the morning and we went directly for the drones workshop, where we assembled frames and added motors on top of the drones that might end up seeing some action in the near future.

We also listened to the first hand stories of how those drones are used, their technical specifications and real life limitations.

Chess match

In the same hall was a chess robot, so I decided to play a match against him. Went for 1200 Elo as I just got back to playing chess through Duolingo and was currently on that level.

It seems I should have went a bit higher as I beat the robot quite easily. There were options all the way up to grandmaster, so I’m sure I would surely end up with a defeat eventually.

Talks

Out of all the talks I attended, I enjoyed a few the most:

Tomasz Ducin: Jailbreaking 101

Great overview on how AI models could be abused, and how to try to prevent that. Bonus points for seeing Tomasz fall off the stage, but quickly returning without any (major) injuries.

Dominik Kundel: Best Practices of Building Agents

Solid knowledge from the DevEx at OpenAI himself.

Serhii Kupriienko: The Future of War: Autonomy, AI, and Accountability in a New Era of Conflict

Hard data from CEO and Founder of Swarmer about how the drones are used in Ukraine, and how that could be improved even further.

Nick Bilogorskiy: The Dark Side of AI: Injection, Poisoning, Extraction and other attacks on AI models

Another talk about messing with models.

Filip Kovačić: Safe AI for autonomy

Tech Lead at Waymo talking about how they built their taxis to operate in the real world.

Summary

WAWTECH hosted 3000 attendees, 60 speakers, and 30 partners - you could feel it was a busy place for those two days for sure.

Looking at the talks (and the workshop) above you can see the trend I followed at the conference: drones and AI. There was no web game development specifically, but I enjoyed the conference anyway spending most of the time with Piotr and also meeting with Kamil.

Devconnect Argentina 2025

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I had the opportunity to travel across the world to Buenos Aires in Argentina to attend Devconnect 2025, the biggest Ethereum event worldwide happening November 17th-22nd, all thanks to the Scholars program.

I learned about the program from Riely, since Geodework was managing the Community track of the Scholars program. My activities around both the js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities fit perfectly, as we have Decentralized category in the first one and mostly blockchain-related Challenges in the second one since 2021. On top of that, Scaffold-ETH was supporting the Gamedev.js Jam all the way back in 2022 already, and Geodework did the same for the recent js13kGames competition in 2025.

Preparations

After being accepted into the Scholars program a few months before the actual event happening in November, we’ve attended bi-weekly calls to learn about each other, both as a whole group of almost 100 people, but also within a given category: Legal, Artists, Journalists, Community, and Other Builders.

I did a short, 5 minute talk about js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities I presented to our group at one of the calls.

Travel to Buenos Aires

My flight from Warsaw to Buenos Aires was going through Paris - it was all in the early morning, the first leg was delayed due to heavy fog in Paris, and so… I missed my connecting flight.

I was originally suppose to land Sunday before midnight which was late already, but now it was going to be even worse. The next flight I was offered was suppose to be the next day, so I’d arrive Monday before midnight and miss the whole first day with the keynotes and Scholars meetup included.

Luckily enough, we’ve found a connection through… Bogota. There was literally one last seat available for the only flight departing that day able to take me to Buenos Aires. What was even more funny was that Paul was flying from Canada to Buenos Aires through Bogota as well. The weird part was that there were TWO flights departing from the Bogota airport to Buenos Aires within 20 minutes of each other, both arriving to Buenos Aires within 10 minutes of each other, and we were NOT on the same flights. It was even the same local company. I obvously wanted to change my booking to join Paul’s flight, but we learned eventually that his was landing in the city centre on the Jorge Newbery Airport (AEP), while mine did so on the outskirts of the city on the bigger Ministro Pistarini International Airport (EZE).

So, I flew from Paris to Bogota, had another delay and ran through the Bogota airport, caught up with Paul to have a 5 minute chat, then had issues boarding the plane as my return flight wasn’t even flying through Bogota in the first place, so their system wasn’t allowing me to board the plane, but it worked eventually. So, Warsaw to Paris to Bogota to Buenos Aires, and after 30 hours with only one or two hours of sleep total I landed Monday morning, 6 AM. Last stretch was 1 hour drive from the airport through traffic to arrive in the hotel.

Fun fact about Air France, since it was my very first time flying with them: instead of a stewardess asking if you want to drink anything (water, soda, etc), they were asking if you want to drink champaigne specifically instead.

Hotel

I’ve stayed at Hotel Palermitano, which didn’t even look like a hotel from the outside, more like a home or fancy office, given how small the front facing part of the building was. Inside it was a really comfy place, with three floors of rooms. Many Scholars were also booked there, so we had the opportunity to have a chat during breakfast.

Interesting thing about the hotel was that they didn’t give you any key - instead, you’d scan a QR code, confirm your WhatsApp account and receive a code via a message that you’d then use on the keypad next to the door to your room to enter.

The whole Palermo Soho neighbourhood was really nice, with many fancy restaurants, but also lots of graffiti on many buildings. I had about 20 minute walk from the hotel to the venue, which given the perfect weather was such a relaxing thing to do each day.

Venue

La Rural was HUGE. So many buildings, one bigger than the other. I thought GitHub Universe held at Fort Mason was big. Years ago I was at BrazilJS in Porto Alegre with about 1 000 attendees and thought nothing bigger is going to happen for me, ever. La Rural this year hosted about 20 000 attendees, so you can imagine the scale of the event.

There were so many building to visit, with countless activities, side conferences and meetups, with even more happening outside in random places of Buenos Aires, either right next to the venue or across the city.

Beside planning to attend the Scholars sessions I’ve decided to follow as many web gamedev related events as possible - good thing I was hanging out with Paul Gadi, Austin Griffith led the BuidlGuidl activities, and Nejc Košir was hosting the Gaming District, so there was plenty of opportunities to meet and chat with fellow devs.

Monday

After arriving from the airport I’ve left my bags in the hotel room and had a quick shower to refresh after a 30 hour trip, and then met with Paul - we had a quick walk to the venue to hopefully make it for the opening keynotes.

We did eventually, even though there was a huge line at the entrance not moving for at least 15-20 minutes.

Monday was Ethereum Day with Opening Ceremony in the morning, including a talk from Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. The first part of his talk was surprisingly basic, explaining what ETH is, but the second part went into the near and far future for the cryptocurrency and the whole ecosystem, which was way more exciting.

In the meantime Paul had his Cryptogames Retrospective talk on the Lightning Stage in the next pavilion, and given most of the space had booths, the talk’s audio was streamed directly to the headphones available on every seat. Quite an unusual experience, but worked pretty well.

After that we went around La Rural checking out all the booths, or at least those in the pavilions close to us given how big the whole venue was. We also visited the Gaming District to check on Nejc and the games showcased there.

Later in the early evening I’ve attended the Scholars session where we talked about us: where we’re coming from, and what we expect to get out of Devconnect.

There were various meetups happening in the late evening, but I was so tired after the long trip that I returned to my hotel room and went to sleep almost immediately.

Tuesday

Next day in the morning we went to check the Gaming District again and hang out with folks there for a while.

After that me and Paul decided to join the BuidlGuidl’s Bootcamp - started with Austin Griffith’s general intro, the Speedrun Ethereum intro in particular, and a talk about stablecoins. Most of those things you can read on Speedrun Ethereum’s website, but I figured it’s a good opportunity to catch up on the topic as I haven’t played with blockchain development for some time now.

After the sessions we had stumbled into a barbeque with some solid meat selection and went for the grilled meat sandwich, which was delicious. There were lunch options provided by the conference organizers, but they invited food trucks as well, offering a bigger selection of options. Plus, you could literally pay for your food with crypto, which was awesome on itself.

We’ve decided to join 1confirmation meetup in the evening which was happening in a venue close to our hotels. Wearing my js13kGames t-shirt was the way to go as I bumped into a guy who knew the competition and we talked about it for a while. Also, Paul had his own js13k on him as well, so we needed to take a pic together for posterity.

Wednesday

We’ve started the day with another BuidlGuidl session, this time about prediction markets. After that the usual visit to hang out with the Gaming District folks happened.

Next on the schedule was joining the ETHGlobal Demo Day close to La Rural, but it turned out to be a super tiny coffee place with micro booths at the top, and a whole lot of people trying to get in, so after spending a few minutes there we went out.

Returning to La Rural we’ve decided to go through the park, and it turned out to be… a botanical garden. Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays had free entry, so we decided to spend some time chilling there past lunch.

After checking it all out, on our way back to La Rural, we’ve decided to enter another park, which ended up being… a zoo. Again, free entry, so with no specific plans for the next hour or two we went straight into Buenos Aires Eco-Park. It was quite an unusal zoo, given among flamingos or giraffes there were monkeys jumping around, capybaras in every pit, and parrots flying everywhere.

My allergy kicked in so hard though, given in Poland in November the pollen season is already over and I was rightfully out of my medication, while Buenos Aires offered a truly summer weather and a whole lot of pollinating trees and flowers. I had running nose and was sneezing like crazy for the rest of the day, but still was happy we did leave tech sessions under the roof the enjoy the outside world with sunny weather, beautiful plants and trees, and exotic animals.

Last event of the day was BuidlGuidl’s one again: Austin ran a small hackathon around his Max Extract game. I vibe coded some of the tasks with Cursor absolutely not knowing what I was doing, but still ended up around the third place after all, which was pretty amazing.

Thursday

The next day started with another BuidlGuidl session, this time about Farcaster Miniapps.

We’ve quickly registered and joined NoirCon 3 afterwards, but decided to go to StarkConnect taking dedicated bus to a far away venue as it offered a few gamedev related talks.

First the Loot Survivor author was presenting about his project, then a panel of experts including Dojo and Cartridge folks talked about fully on-chain games. The final talk of this event for us was the overview of gaming on Starknet led by Tarrence, co-founder of Cartridge.

We ate lunch there, and then went back to La Rural to hang out around the Gaming District again. I then went for two Scholars sessions (our Community, and then the whole group). It was raining the whole day, exactly the one when we decided to move between venues, but it wasn’t that bad after all.

The evening revolved around the Speedrunners Get-Together where we talked with the BuildGuidl folks, and having my js13kGames t-shirt on helped me find another fan again. Hearing the question “oh, you made a game for js13kGames?” and seeing his face light up when I answered with “no, I’ve created the thing” was priceless, and we had really cool conversation afterwards.

Moments like those, when “random strangers” at tech conferences know about this very niche competition for web game developers, help me keep it all going and brighten my day.

Friday

We’ve started Friday attending Trustless Agents Day as Paul wanted to see a few talks, while I prepared and sent the Gamedev.js Weekly newsletter issue.

Next stop was the ETHGlobal venue as Paul and his friend Jayden went to hack on their digicam project. I registered in the morning, but since I never participated in ETHGlobal before I wasn’t accepted immediately and had to return to La Rural, and then went to my hotel room.

Saturday

Since I did get the acceptance email eventually, I went to join both Paul and Jayden at ETHGlobal, but decided to vibe code a game myself instead of teaming up with them on their project. I was thinking of using Phaser’s Beam first, but it pivoted from “Phaser Editor on steroids” outputting code to “gamifying playable shorts” video sequences, which unfortunately didn’t fit my requirements anymore.

I’ve dusted off my Enclave Phaser Template and launched GitHub Copilot, since I have the Pro+ account for being in the GitHub Stars program. Since Game Off’s theme was “waves”, and I wanted to have as simple controls and core game loop as possible, I experimented with one of the ideas I had: endless runner with a beaver, Bober River Flow, where you navigate the animal swimming in a river and try to avoid incoming logs.

I spent literally only a few hours on this, so it’s nothing more than a proof of concept or a 0.001 version, but wanted to publish something, anything after so many years of not releasing a single game. I also attempted to participate in the Celo challenge to be eligible for ETHGlobal itself in the first place, but failed miserably as I had no idea what I was doing most of the time anyway, and the integration part didn’t actually work.

Wearing another js13kGames t-shirt helped again as more folks knowing about the competition approached me and we had a cool chat about web games in general. It’s incredible how it all plays out, so I’m definitely going to continue wearing js13k shirts at more events.

Saturday evening was all about relaxing after a busy week as I’ve booked La Cabrera in advance earlier to taste argentinian steak before flying back home to Poland. The restaurant was literally a few blocks away from my hotel, which I didn’t even knew when booking the table. Me and Paul both enjoyed the food and the atmosphere of the place a lot - I think it was the best steak I had in my life, or at least one of the very best for sure.

Sunday

My flight was suppose to be late in the evening, so after stuffing myself with a lot of delicious food the day before, I decided to go for a walk. The weather was perfect, so I wanted to get as much sun as possible before flying to a dark and cloudy place called home, that’s why I ended up walking for 2 hours straight and doing 10 kilometers from my hotel to the famous Obelisco.

The rest of the day was spent packing and going to the airport.

Travel back home

Fortunately enough, traveling from Buenos Aires to Warsaw through Paris went smooth without any issues this time. I’ve arrived late evening and was greeted by my wife and daughter at the airport.

Summary

Being invited to Devconnect 2025 as a Scholar was truly an incredible opportunity - this was a huge event full of awesome people, I had so many inspiring conversation throughout the week. We had great weather (even the raining days were super productive), delicious food (I’ll remember that steak for years), and wonderful people (I spent most of the time with Paul, and I’m really thankful to Austin and Nejc for delivering massive amount of gaming content I could enjoy).

The whole concept behind the Scholars program is amazing, big thank you goes to Riely for inviting me, Perrie for handling all the calls, meetups, and logistics, the rest of the team and everyone involved, and of course all the Scholars for being a lovely group of people.

The Artifact

After attending Devconnect, each Scholar is expected to create an artifact:

A free-format creation that expresses their learning and experience in the medium of their choice. It could be a lesson learned, a new project, or just reflections - the value of the artifact is in the act of creating it and sharing with others.

The easiest for me would be this very blog post, but I publish such recaps from the events I attend anyway. So, given I was invited because of the js13kGames and Gamedev.js communities, I thought it would be fitting to go ahead and prepare a dedicated Ethereum challenge in the upcoming Gamedev.js Jam 2026 happening in April next year, since we had Decentralized category and challenges in both since 2021, and we never had this particular one before.

I’m really excited to see how it all goes, especially since a new program just appeared: ETH Stars, resembling both Mozilla Tech Speakers and GitHub Stars - I’d love to be involved, one way or the other, given years of my experience in both. Maybe there’s even a chance to grow OP Guild as part of that, who knows!

Stars at GitHub Universe 2025

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was invited for the third time to GitHub Universe happening at Fort Mason in San Francisco, thanks to the GitHub Stars program I’m part of for the fifth year, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Day 0

On the first day, since we count from zero, was the event at GitHub HQ in downtown San Francisco dedicated to GitHub Stars, Microsoft MVPs, and Open Source contributors. It was full of talks, sneak peaks of the Universe announcements, and chill out discussions with GitHub’s management.

Since we were all under NDA we were able to raise difficult questions and get honest answers, all while being positive about what we can do to make Open Source as good as it can be with the help from GitHub.

Day 1 and 2

GitHub Universe 2025 was hosted in the same place as last year: Fort Mason. The space is impressive, with multiple buildings close to each other, and beautiful view on the bay. The weather was yet again perfect: warm and sunny throughout the whole event. We got our badges at Day 0, so there was no need to stay in line for registration in the morning - perfect moment to snap a pic with my own star before everyone stepping on it.

The first day of the conference started with the keynote: this year it was all about Copilot. From Agent HQ, a mission control center for agents and tasks, through custom agents, plan mode, agentic code review, to MCP integration, code quality, and much more.

After the keynote I went to the Stars Lounge, our booth for Stars to hang out, where I spent most of the time. In the meantime I was going out to check all the other booths, visited Makerspace to grab LEGO Copilot (you had to assemble it yourself first), made my own Mona sticker, grabbed a few gadgets and had some cool conversations throughout both days.

I also attended the LEGO talk, which was really interesting. At some point the RenderATL folks took over out booth, which was really nice, as they bring fun topics to discuss, including The Commits awards show.

Game Zone, PixiJS and Spark booths

One cool thing made different this year compared to the previous ones was a Game Zone built by Lee Reilly and the team. It was a huge screen put out in the open, right in front of the food court. You could play different web games using console controllers, either solo or in a team.

At the end of the second day the Space Huggers game from js13kGames 2021 was being showcased, so I gathered small Stars representation to have four of them play the game together, which was really enjoyable.

Talking about games: there were also PixiJS and Spark booths during the first day of Universe. I had a chat with Mat Groves, PixiJS creator, on Day 0, and noticed their booth was quite busy during the conference. Same goes for the Spark booth right next to them, where I met Diego Marcos - our js13kGames 2025 WebXR expert, first time talking with him face to face.

Who knows, maybe we’ll have PixiJS or Spark challenges in the upcoming Gamedev.js Jam 2026? That would be awesome.

Wrapping the games topic: GitHub Game Off organized by Lee started on November 1st and will be running till the end of the month, and the theme in 2025 is Waves - I’ll try to join this year, with the help from Copilot or Beam.

Food

Since I’ve stayed at the exact same hotel near Union Square as usual, we had breakfast at Pinecrest Diner each morning - the classic US experience including lots of greasy bacon, steak with scrambled eggs, and coffee refill. I gained more than 2 kilograms in 4 days on this alone!

Beside breakfast, we also had ramen for dinner on Sunday evening, snacks and drinks during Day 0 at GitHub HQ, solid lunch options during both days of Universe, with snacks at the CodeRabbit meetup after the first day of the conference.

We’ve wrapped the event with the proper peruvian dinner at Mariposas with delicious ceviche, empanadas, and lomo saltado after the second day.

Shopping

Did I mention my hotel was near Union Square? Turns out a new Nintendo shop was opened recently literally one block away, and Pop-Mart one more block further.

I couldn’t miss the opportunity and bought some gifts - mostly Mario, but also Pikmin as apparently a whole section of the shop was dedicated to those little creatures. I’ve enjoyed playing Pikmin 4 with my daughter Kasia, so got one immediately.

I couldn’t miss Pop-Mart of course, so I went for the surprise box with the newest Labubu monsters’ letter keychains as the dolls themselves were already sold out. Kasia wanted a K, but ended up with H, so she’s laughing she now has Habubu.

Summary

It was truly awesome to meet fellow Stars and GitHub folks, Open Source friends old and new.

I’m proud to be a GitHub Star, and hope I’ll return to San Francisco next year.

js13kGames 2025 rigid yard sign

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, you read that right: I wanted to try Sticker Mule’s new rigid yard sign offer and they delivered - I’m now a proud owner of the js13kGames-branded sign without even having a yard!

I already reviewed cool stuff from Sticker Mule in the recent past: Framed Post about a js13kGames tweet in March 2024, and Framed Print with Gamedev.js Jam 2025 Balance theme image in June 2025.

They now have brand new rigid yard signs in their offer with anything you want printed on them, so I went with js13kgames 2025 Black Cat theme, the one with the “hidden” Badlucky we’re using for this year’s t-shirts.

The sign was printed on both sides, and even had a metal H-stake in the package for when you’d actually want to put it in your yard, since it’s weather resistant. The sign itself turned out great, and presents itself on the wall next to my swag shelf in the home office.

The print looks awesomely solid, so I can totally recommend you try that out for yourself!

Another one for the wall: Gamedev.js Jam 2025 theme in a Framed Print

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

After trying out Framed Posts from Sticker Mule last year with a nicely captured js13kGames tweet, I decided to give their new product, Framed Prints, a go - and this time, obviously, I went with something a little bit more visual.

Turn any image into a beautiful piece of modern art. Upload your image and see an instant proof. Incredible print quality and hand crafted frames. Free shipping.

The moment I saw Sticker Mule added Framed Prints to their product lineup, I knew exactly what I wanted to put in the frame:

The Gamedev.js Jam 2025 theme visualization, the same one we used on the limited edition Balance-themed t-shirts for this year’s jam - you can buy one in our Spreadshirt Shop right now.

The author of the image is of course Ewa, as always. This not only look great on the shirts, but also perfectly capture the theme of Balance we explored throughout the jam. Turning it into a framed print felt like a natural next step.

Compared to the Framed Post, which is a stylized snapshot of a tweet, the Framed Print is exactly what it sounds like: your image, printed on high-quality paper, beautifully framed, and ready to hang. No social media context or extra text - just pure artwork.

This feels like a great way to commemorate a special moment or milestone - whether it’s a tweet, a logo, or any other visual memory tied to the things you care about.

I used the same image file we prepared for the t-shirt design, uploaded it through Sticker Mule’s interface, and a few days later it arrived in a securely packaged box, ready to be unwrapped and mounted.

The print quality is sharp, the colors are vibrant, and the black frame adds a nice touch of contrast without overpowering the design.

Now I’ve got a js13kGames 2024 tweet and a Gamedev.js Jam 2025 theme staring back at me every time I look up from the screen.

If you’re running an event, releasing a game, or simply want a custom print of your own work hanging on your wall, this is definitely worth checking out.

W3C Games CG March 2025: Loading and Control API

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

During our W3C Games Community Group meetup happening on March 25th we’ve formulated the idea of a brand new Community Group being created specifically around the concept of Loading and Control API.

It all started with Tom Greenaway’s Open Mini Games proposal a few years ago, and was brought back during November’s meetup where we had Andrew Gildfind from GameSnacks talking about discovery, distribution, and monetisation.

The following is a proposed charter for a new W3C Community Working Group which aims to define a Micro-API outlining a boundary between a web game and the page on which it is embedded.

Feel free to go through Loading and Control API for Web Games Community Group Charter document and leave any comments or questions you might have about the goals, scope of work, or deliverables.

By creating a new group instead of having the current one we won’t be needing to change the charter, which would mean all members needing to actively agree to it or be kicked out. The original group was created to have an open discussion (mostly through our online meetups) about web games in general, which can still serve its purpose, while the new one would actually focus on the work needed to have such API documented and implemented.

Gamedev.js Survey 2024 results at W3C WebDX meetup

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I was presenting the Gamedev.js Survey 2024 results at the recent bi-weekly W3C WebDX online meetup that happened on February 20th.

I’m part of the Web Developer eXperience Community Group since last year, when the Survey was officially invited. During the meetup I was showing the current results, and comparing them to what we ended up with last year.

Key points revolved around technologies, monetization, AI sentiment, but also happiness. The 2024 report can be viewed on the website and downloaded as pdf, with detailed results on GitHub.

I do plan to present the results at the W3C Games CG as well, though we haven’t confirmed the date for the upcoming meetup yet. Next steps for the Survey itself though would be to have it run earlier than in the very last month of the year, so maybe around July-September.

Fifth year of being a GitHub Star

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

My GitHub Star status was just renewed for the fifth year in a row - it’s been quite the journey already, but it’s not over yet.

Here are all the announcements:

[2021] Becoming a GitHub Star
[2022] GitHub Star status renewed
[2023] My GitHub Star status renewed again
[2024] My GitHub Star status renewed for the fourth year!

The very first blog post attempts to list the possible contributions that landed me this achievement, with the leading factor being the wonderful js13kGames community, since the source code of all the games from all the years all the way back to 2012 are hosted on GitHub.

I really enjoyed my time at GitHub Universe 2024 and meeting the other Stars personally. I’ll continue trying to give back to the community as much as I can, hopefully with some coding and writing around GitHub Copilot and AI for game development specifically. Wish me luck!

W3C Games CG November 2024: GameSnacks

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

On November 26th, after a few long months, we’ve returned with the W3C Games Community Group meetup and had GameSnacks talking about discovery, distribution, and monetisation.

This was somewhat a follow-up to the discussion we had a few years back about Open Mini Games proposed by Tom Greenaway. At the recent meetup we had Andrew Gildfind from Google, a product manager for GameSnacks handling HTML5 ads for games, who was presenting about their platform. Tom Greenaway, AI and Games advocate at Google (and also W3C Games CG chair) was leading the discussion around the future of discovery, distribution, and monetisation.

At the meetup we had folks from the publishers side like Poki and CrazyGames, but also the game engines side with Phaser and Defold, and game developers (me representing Enclave Games among others) as well. We all agreed that we should investigate formalizing Open Mini Games Format into an API ⁄ SDK all parties could start using.

The Open Mini Games (OMG) format is a proposal to define a set of combined minimum requirements that game developers can implement when developing a game that is playable in a web browser or a client which renders HTML5 content. The aim of the requirements is to provide the information necessary to surface a web game in a standardized manner on discovery platforms such as browsers but also embedded platforms.

We’ll most probably start with an MVP ⁄ prototype first, and work from there during our regular W3C Games Community Group meetups.

We’ve also discussed internally if we should update the current group’s charter, create a new one, or place the idea in a W3C incubator, with the option of creating a new one with interested parties joining in probably being the best for now. With “W3C Games Working Group” we could actually specify the work needed to be done to create a formal standard.

We do plan to have another W3C Games CG meetup in January to keep the momentum going and discuss the next steps.

Stars gathering at GitHub Universe 2024

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The end of October was the second time I went to US to attend GitHub Universe in person after the 2023 edition, and this time was the tenth anniversary of the event itself happening in a new San Francisco venue: Fort Mason.

Last year’s edition had Nova, a mini-conference dedicated to GitHub Stars, which was skipped this time, but other than that we had similar schedule: Day 0 (October 27th) with all the Community and Open Source stuff, and then two days of the Universe conference itself (October 28th-29th).

My travel from Europe went rather smooth, if you don’t count the usual jetlag. What greeted me when leaving the train station I took from the airport was surreal though: a convoy of a few Waymo’s (self-driving cars), followed by Tesla Cybertruck, and a homeless man yelling something about the end of the world in the background.

The next day I had the opportunity to drive a Waymo as a passenger, which was truly incredible. The self-driving car clearly had to went through multiple iterations, because it was driving carefully, but also quite confident. I can’t wait to see such wonders in more cities around the world!

Day Zero

The first, or technically the zero day was held at the InterContinental Hotel in the city centre.

We had the opportunity to hear the big announcements planned for the next day at Universe from the CEO himself, Thomas Dohmke.

It was also a good opportunity to chat in the breakout rooms about all the things related to Open Source with other Stars and GitHub folks.

Day One

The first day of the Universe conference started with the keynote full of interesting facts and announcements. Then we had many sessions in various locations as Universe took place in the whole Fort Mason complex, taking over multiple buildings at once.

There was a huge building entirely dedicated to partners’ booths, which I checked right after the keynote, and attended a couple sessions. Then I went straight to the GitHub Stars Lounge we had for ourselves in the keynote building.

The meetups: CodeRabbit and Figma

Me and a few other Stars decided to visit some meetups happening after the first day of the conference: the first one was organized by the CodeRabbit team, and the other by Figma folks.

We got tired pretty fast though and decided to return to our hotel rooms to get some sleep.

Day Two

The second day of the conference started with another keynote, although with less big announcements. We did have GitHub Game Off mentioned on the stage and a video with the stories from a couple of Stars as well though.

I was at the GitHub Stars Lounge most of the second day - I had one hour shift, but spent way more as we had some cool conversations going there throughout the day.

The food

I definitely can’t complain about the food - we did visit one of the best breakfast places in San Francisco, the Pinecrest Diner, twice!

We also had great ramen in one of the evenings, and visited Little Delhi the other night, where more interesting conversations took place.

The summary

The new venue was great, we had beautiful weather, all the people were awesome. I so much enjoyed my time in San Francisco, it brought our group closer together more than a full year of online meetups.

Spent most of the time with Santosh, but also met Jan, Daniel, and many other awesome Stars. Had really deep conversations as well, I’m definitely gonna remember the Little Delhi discussions with Jan and Jonathan. I had such a great time with Corbin, Emanuele, Gary, Colby, Jess, Rob, Jonah, Simon, Beatriz, Leonardo, and many others I apologize I didn’t mention.

Howard and Anisha did an awesome job creating this wonderful group of genuine people and keeping it together. The only time I felt such positive vibes was the Mozilla Tech Speakers program years ago.

I also had soome time to talk with Lee and play their cool arcade games in person, which always add to the fun people can have at the conference.

If there will be an opportunity to attend Universe next year I’ll definitely do everything to be there again!

Judging the first DEV Web Game Challenge

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I was asked to judge the entries submitted to the very first Web Game Challenge organized by the DEV team in September, with the results being published at the beginning of October.

We have been organizing challenges (mini-hackathons) on DEV for a few months now, and are planning to announce our first web game challenge. Given your expertise and involvement with both the gaming community and dev.to, we were wondering if you’d be interested in being a guest judge.

Who could say “no” to that? The Web Game Challenge had two “prompts” to chose from: Build a Web Game and One Byte Explainer. The first revolved around building an actual web game following the Aliens theme, while the second asked participants to explain any given concept in 256 characters or less.

The Challenge received a lot of submissions - between September 18th and 29th almost 50 games and almost 40 explainers were sent. It was difficult to pick a single winner in both, even with a shortlist of 5-10 entries. Ultimately I went for:

Best Web Game: Alien Waves by Justin Young
Best Explainer: Event Listeners by Hikolakita

You can read my reasoning behind picking those in the DEV announcement blog post published on October 1st. I also liked two more games that were close to the first spot, Galactic Breach for the Twister-like gameplay which was really fun to play and SpaceType Continuum for utilizing an engaging typing mechanism.

Winners got DEV++ memberships, gifts, and exclusive winner badges, while all the other participants received completion badges. I’m really happy I was involved, and I hope more web game challenges will be organized on the DEV platform in the future!

ETHWarsaw 2024 and Warsaw Blockchain Week

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Although I’m quite busy with the js13kGames competition, I did find the time to attend ETHWarsaw conference that happened last week as I missed the first two editions entirely.

ETHWarsaw [III] will bring close to 1000 builders and innovators from the community to discuss growth in the bull market, responsible innovation and challenges we’re about to face. We will look into privacy and security of our data, explore the new scalability challenges beyond L2s and lots more.

ETHWarsaw took place in Warsaw Breweries, a relatively new spot in the capital. The conference was happening on September 5th-6th, which is right in the middle of the online js13kGames competition, quite close to the submission deadline on September 13th.

I did miss the first two editions happening in 2022 and 2023, both because of being too busy with js13kGames. This time though, since I shifted focus a bit and joined OP Games to run OP Guild, it made sense to stretch the availability a bit and try to attend after all. Especially that I wanted to talk with the Elympics folks about the guild anyway.

I was lucky enough to get the ticket as part of the media partnership with Gamedev.js, where quite often various conferences (mostly front-end and JavaScript ones) would be interested to share the info about their events with our community on Facebook.

The first day of the conference started with the opening and was full of interesting talks (and other types of sessions) in multiple rooms, big and small, throughout the day. I enjoyed the ones I attended, but also spent some time in the quiet room working.

In the evening I went to the Elympics on TON. Gaming, Redefined meetup which was part of the Warsaw Blockchain Week happening between September 4th and 8th. I talked with the Elympics folks about multiple things, including OP Guild and js13kGames - had a great time, it seems we share a similar vision to web gamedev on the blockchain.

The second day was packed with content too. The one session I liked the most was about Farcaster Frames by Simone Staffa aka limone.eth.

Overall I’m really happy I was able to attend - I enjoyed the talks, met a few old friends and folks I haven’t seen a long time, had some cool conversations with random strangers, ate tasty food an worked a bit in the meantime as well. I already know I’ll be aiming to repeat that next year!

Burning out... and shifting focus again

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Learning the truth that the only constant is change is the most annoying thing someone with a solid plan can experience. Bonus points if you’re in the autism spectrum and hate any changes to your plan whatsoever.

Remember my Shifting focus blog post from 2020? The one published a few months after the Covid hit, with mostly bad news: no more local Gamedev.js Meetups in Warsaw, the closing of the Mozilla Tech Speakers program along the layoffs of all the dev-facing teams within Mozilla itself, and me pausing traveling and speaking activities.

There were some good news too: we were awarded that year with the grant from the Grant for the Web program run by Coil, so we could play around and experiment with the Web Monetization API - a new way to send micro amounts of money right in the browser between two individuals without any third parties. This sounded like a great opportunity to test within web games and see if it’s a viable option for indie game developers.

We had fun releasing two of our latest games, Body Guard and Forest Cuties, in 2021. They both were implementing some specific functions of the Web Monetization API: probabilistic revenue sharing and receipt verifier service respectively. Coil eventually shut down in 2023, but I really enjoyed tinkering with the cutting-edge tech again.

The js13kGames competition is running since 2012, while the Gamedev.js Jam started in 2020. The pandemic forced many companies to invest into online presence like never before, so sponsorships in both competitions soared. Encouraged by the situation, I decided to pursue the dream of having a sustainable business out of running both events each year, and being able to cover expenses of our whole family.

This, unfortunately, didn’t last long when the global economic crisis hit and those same companies were cutting costs and firing entire departments. I was spending more and more time trying to acquire sponsorships, which at times was very tiring. My main job for multiple weeks straight was sending emails and joining calls to talk about the exact same things, and then after a few months of conversations hearing “well, we actually don’t have budget for that anymore”.

Putting more hours into this haven’t given me more financial stability, so I was stressing a lot. I tried to make everything bigger and better to finally reach that goal, but the interest was dropping.

Not to mention something that deserves it’s own book - the legendary “new js13kGames backend” that I tried to have since 2014, because we were running on a temporary solution, and failed with multiple people for multiple reasons at least 6 or 7 times from scratch up until now. The last two or three attempts broke me, because I was trying hard to be optimistic, but it ended up the same every single time. At some point I knew it will never happen, I got depressed and wanted to shut down everything to never look at it again. I realized I’ve burned out years ago and was physically suffering just by thinking about another edition of the js13kGames competition, but I couldn’t let it go.

Fortunately enough, I got help. I’m in a therapy now. I’m working towards a healthier relationship with my job. We’ve diagnosed our daughter with Asperger’s, an autism spectrum, which surprisingly enough my therapy also uncovered in me after being deeply buried under multiple layers of trauma since childhood.

Feeling I need to sort things out I was wrapping up all unfinished tasks, big and small, patiently completing them or throwing out off the enormous TODO list I had for Enclave Games, which was taking at least a few screens of text. After a few months I got that down to about 20-30 items, and was slowly thinking about my passion again - coding games, since the last opportunity was three years ago, and only because we got that Web Monetization grant.

Building hyper casual web games themselves don’t earn you a lot if you don’t invest your time and efforts into licensing them to publishers, so this felt more like for fun than profit, at least in the short term. I didn’t worry much, as I was focusing on clearing the TODO list first…

…and then conversations with Paul and Chase from OP Games started to revolve around this cool new idea…

…of me actually jumping into the Developer Relations role for them, since it looks like I kind of run communities. So I would fit perfectly into leading the newly formed OP Guild, which would focus on helping indie web game developers dive into web3. Something I actually wanted to do myself since 2020, but was too busy trying to earn enough off of online competitions. Something that resembles the grant from Coil - playing with cool new technology and not needing to worry about paying the bills.

So, that’s exactly what is happening: I’m joining OP Games to lead OP Guild, and I’m gonna have fun building cool demos and releasing small games trying to utilize web3, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and everything else in between I find not-quite-production-ready-but-interesting-enough-to-play-with and enjoy my time doing that. If you think 100% of crypto projects are scams stealing your money (I’m sorry if some did), and will hate me for what I decided to do - I don’t care, just don’t bother me. I want to enjoy game development again, and this is exactly what I plan on doing to achieve that.

Don’t worry, the js13kGames competition and the Gamedev.js Jam will still be happening the exact same way they did, it’s just that I won’t be needing to waste my time chasing sponsors anymore. This opportunity couldn’t come in a better time, really. I’m gonna do mine, you do yours, and if you think it’s worth exploring what I’m gonna do with OP Guild, then please join me and let’s talk!

W3C Games CG April 2024: GDC

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The second W3C Games CG online meetup this year (after January’s AI one) happened last week, on Tuesday April 30th - this time we’ve talked about Web games at GDC.

Game Developer’s Conference was held in San Francisco in March, and you could notice bigger-than-usual web presence there. Both Poki and Godot had their booths, while CrazyGames and Meta lurked around the halls.

The whole session revolved around GDC participants sharing their experiences: Erik from Poki, Noël from Meta, Adam from Godot (even though it was 4 AM for him!), Rafael from CrazyGames, and Björn from Defold, with others asking questions and adding to the discussion as well.

Overall the sentiment seems to be very positive, and we might expect even more web games next year, since companies like Discord and LinkedIn are currently investing a lot of their time and resources into web games. I could totally imagine their booths at GDC 2025 having some cool browser games for visitors to play while having fruitful conversations at the same time.

Check out the video and transcript if you’re curious what exactly have we talked about and how folks liked the event!

Hang your tweets on a wall with framed posts from StickerMule

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

StickerMule, the company from which we’re buying all our stickers for more than a decade already decided to print tweets and frame them, so you can hang them on your wall. Weird? Yes. Did I get one? Obviously!

I have some frames in the office already: it started with the GitHub Star award, and later the two sets of Grid Studio frames arrived, each with their own amount of nostalgia attached.

Now the brand new item was added to the collection, the weirdest of them all: framed post from StickerMule.

I know my own tweets aren’t very popular, so I decided to go with something that won’t look ridiculously empty, and went for the js13kGames 2023 winners announcement.

The shipping went smooth as usual, and I received my package only a few days after ordering it - was properly secured and everything looked perfectly ok.

The frame itself looks great, the quality superb: sleek black fit the style of the other items well, although if you want to be extra fancy you can go for the ornate gold instead. It can be an original gift for yourself or anyone with the similar sense of humor.

It’s so absurd that I love it, and you can get one too - black framed posts cost $39 and the gold ones $69.

My GitHub Star status renewed for the fourth year!

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I’m staying in the GitHub Stars program for another year! I wasn’t sure this will be extended for the fourth time, since at the very beginning the plan was to have any given Star for a maximum of three years in the program and then automatically turn them into an alumni.

Fortunately enough this is no longer valid, so I entered my fourth year as a GitHub Star, and I’m really happy about it! I’m still the only one in Poland, but hoping this might change in the future.

I guess not much has changed in terms of why I was chosen (and renewed) - you can check my first blog post from 2021 enumerating some potential guesses, since the next two follow-ups only iterate over it. TL;DR: Enclave Games work, js13kGames community, and Gamedev.js activities. So, here’s to another year of Open Source Web Game Development!

I’d love to do something around the idea of building web games with the help from GitHub Copilot this year, but if you’ve seen my Yearly Reports you know very well making plans and finishing projects are two separate things here. Still, you could keep your fingers crossed for this one even for just a little bit.