onGameStart 2012

The most important thing in the life adventure is to remember when and how did it start. First impressions, inspirations and simple steps shape the future.
My gaming experience started in mid '90 on my XT with Hercules graphic card and amber screen. I was too young (and I lived on the other side of the iron curtain) to remember Apple II or Commodore computers before. One of the first games I remember from my early childhood was 'Prince of Persia' made by Jordan Mechner. I played it for almost 12 years before I was able to finish it without cheating (I can still remember 'prince megahit' password that enables cheat mode). I'm sure that a lot of you had similar experience.

What does this have to do with onGameStart?

Earlier this year I tweeted that HTML5 gamedevs are the new generation of game makers, and like every other 'new generation' we reinvent the same patterns or techniques our older friends implemented 30 years ago. There is no better way to learn, than listen to the real experts. That's why Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, will share his experience during this year's Main onGameStart Keynote.

During two days of the conference it will be also possible to listen to presentations of the biggest, most talented and most respected HTML5 game developers from all over the world. And differently from last year, we will focus on real HTML5 games, tools that could help you write your own game, and wide variety of services for distribution, payments, statistics, and everything you will need to create great game. No more tech demos or examples - we all know that HTML5 has become mature enough, and players don't care about the technology - they want games. And we need those players and those games to prove that Open Web Technologies can compete with any other technology used in game development.

First part of confirmed speakers list for this year's edition of the first HTML5 game conference:
Seb Lee-Delisle, trainer on CreativeJS workshops
Jerome Etienne, creator of learningthreejs.com and tQuery
Jon Howard, responsible for games for kids in BBC
Andres Pagella, creator of Tracy and author of "Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript"
Szymon Pilkowski, former senior JS developer in Crytek & Bigpoint
Robert Podgorski, boss of Black Moon Dev, one of the best pixel artists ever
Jonas Wagner, author of great WebGL demos
And of course last but not least,
Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia

So about 30 seconds ago we have launched our site, onGameStart.com. And because it's all about gaming, we've simply created a game with outstanding graphics by Robert. Control little astronaut with arrow keys, use space to talk to the speakers (close the window with 'z'), avoid lasers and spikes, and use keycards to open the door. If you don't want to explore our oGS spaceship, you can simply click on the head of the speaker in the top menu, and you will be teleported to the given speaker - you can still talk with him using space. game was created using Dominic's ImpactJS so it should work in most of the browsers. If you happen to find a bug, typo etc, feel free to tweet me about that (@michalbe). Enjoy, and stay tuned (Lanyrd, Facebook & Twitter)! We will announce more speakers and surprises soon.