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.

The Flame Party Helsinki

If you are planning to spend next weekend in Finland, you cannot omit Flame Party organized there by Mozilla, Alternative Party Crew and DOT. It will be awesome weekend full of coding, BBQ, free drinks, Finish saunas and outstanding workshops including one lead by my - "Dive into HTML5 Animation":

"During the workshop you will learn about different methods of animation in JavaScript. We will compare the performance and ease of it's implementation in various browsers on different devices. Are we condemned to use DOM? What about new CSS techniques? Or maybe canvas is future of the web games?"

So what are you waiting for? Register now and follow the party on Lanyrd and Facebook.

GG Workshop

Yesterday I ran Javascript workshop about creating Apps & Games in Social Networks. Fourteen great developers in eight hours tried to create multiplayer checkers (draughts? what's the difference?) game and adapt it to two social network APIs (Facebook & GG.pl). I published source code of the final result on my Github, just as Maciej Konieczny, one of the participants. Here are also my slides and couple of photos:

GG WORKSHOP GAMES & APPS IN JAVASCRIPT

View more presentations from michalbu

I would like to thanks everyone for the presence and I hope we will meet on frontend meetings in near future (like those organized by Google Poland). If you will find some free time feel free to rate my workshop on SpeakerRate.