Check-in on what I’ve been up to

At GDC this year, I had a chance to catch up a bit with a friend of mine, the amazing, multi-talented Elonka Dunin, and in doing so told her a bit about a game project I was in the early stages of developing. I also asked her to follow up with me a few months later to see how the project is going. I did so for a few reasons:

1. I figured in a few months I’d have a better idea of what form the project will take: web-based game? A series of prototypes? Single-player? Multiplayer? etc.
2. I know that sometimes when I stall on a project, simply knowing someone else is/will be checking in gives me a good kick in the pants to get back on the horse
3. It’s nice to keep in touch with friends. Duh.

We often call this kind of quick friendly status check-in a “ping”. Last weekend she kindly “pre-pinged” me to remind me that the official check-in would be happening today. Factor #2 is already in play, since that pre-ping (and today’s impending check-in) has prompted me to write in my blog again, which I’d been procrastinating for quite long enough!

Well, the short story is that the project I talked with people about at GDC is back-burnered, but the feedback and ideas I got from everyone with whom I talked about it was very helpful, and in part inspired me to look in different directions for my next steps as a game maker. So with that intro aside, here’s an update of what I’ve been working on.

Akihabara

At the game jam I co-hosted with Emily Daniels in April, I had the chance to try out the newly-released HTML5 game engine, Akihabara. It was a lot of fun to work with, and I’d love to see truly open tools like this used more often for game jams and eventually all forms of game development. Darius Kazemi felt much the same way, so he and I have teamed up to write a series of tutorials to teach people how to use Akihabara.

We’re targeting the tutorials at those with a working understanding of programming in general, but we’re trying to assume no prior knowledge of common game programming techniques. As such, we hope the tutorials will be useful to those looking to program their first game as well as those seeking to learn Akihabara, specifically.

The tutorial series starts here. We’re planning to write several more tutorials — mapping and camera concepts are next and coming very soon. By the end, we should have a full-functional (albeit simple) game, which we’re calling 8by5 (because it’ll be an “8-way shooter” build on HTML5 tech).

Game Jams

As I mentioned above, Emily Daniels and I co-hosted a game jam at the Sprout space in Davis Square (Cambridge, MA) back in April. The event was quite successful, and I think everyone enjoyed participating and seeing the interactive experiences that resulted as well as hearing about the process each team/participant went through to get there.

I’m currently planning another game jam, tentatively scheduled for some weekend in this coming July, but there are no details to announce yet.

The jams have their own official blog/website, too. We’re also hosting the Akihabara tutorials there and plan to add more tools resources there as time goes on, especially those that are useful for game jams.

Ruby/Rails

I still love working with Ruby on Rails as much as ever and it (along with some related Ruby techs like Sinatra) remains a really awesome way to build web apps large and small. The full release of Rails 3 is imminent and among other things it plays nicely with multiple Javascript frameworks right out of the box and allows for nigh-trivial integration with lightweight Rack apps.

I’m baking up a concept for a card-game-styled, data-driven, client-server game that uses Akihabara libraries and other HTML5 tech to demonstrate some of the awesome things we can do these days with these technologies to make good-looking, data-driven, Flash-free web games. Ideally, it’ll culminate in a set of tools (CSS + Javascript libraries + some nice example Rails/Sinatra code) that can be used to make stuff like this in 48 hours at a jam.