This post was started just few days after onGamesStart but I have hard time finishing it. Talks were really good and I hope that my personal preferences and laziness will not affect great speakers with shorter reviews :)

So let's start:

**Day 0: **
Workshop with Kornel Lesinski & Peter van der Zee - Architecting canvas platformer game

During this workshop you will learn about OOP, game loop, timers, tile maps, game editor, map and character collisions, animation and state transitions, NPC AI. Detailed walkthrough of example code of a fully playable platformer game.

What I have learned
Make your game small and distinct from drawing and input so that it can run on Node or in WebWorker :) So there should be class for Input handling to make it static instead of event driven, and Extract rendering to other Object than game-loop main Object. Thanks to this distinction you can create many different Renderers eg. one for mobile and one for web. With this architecture one game can be displayed with both WebGL and Canvas 2D if WebGL is not available. Really good ideas for creating games, I hope we have 2 days for this workshop so we can really creates them.

Day 1:
Opening session by Michał Budzyński
 
He tried to convince us to stop creating small and dumb clones of tetris and start making bigger and innovative games.
For all of you from US there will be onGameStart.us http://ongamestart.us/  http://lanyrd.com/2013/ogsus/

Laurent Hasson
Anatomy of an App Store

What users want to install on mobile devices, and how much of them are games? As I remember (slides are not yet online) games are second just after social apps, but at the same time games are earning most money :)

Andrzej Mazur
13 simple steps to create a compo

How Andrzej organized js13kgames contest and announced winners : http://js13kgames.com/#winners

Nikolai Onken
BonsaiJS, building multiplayer browser games

Slides: http://nonken.github.com/talks/2012-ongamestart/

First it was mostly about BonsaiJS and how to convert Flash to JavaScript and HTML5 (it can be done! Really impressive). Then general ideas about browser (but these ideas are universal) games. Some of this ideas I know from previous day from Kornel.

Jon Howard
Making games for kids on the mobile web

Creating games for kids in browsers is really hard, most of them is using IE and old phones (like android 1.5, 2.2, 2.3) and they at BBC they can't force kids to update browser. This is really hard situation but Jon showed us games that they created. Most of them are created in DOM, because it is much faster on these older devices. Really impressive.

Pierre-Loic DoulcetTeaching game development through HTML5

Slides: http://www.rvl.io/hexapode/ogs-2012
Pierre-Loic showed us how students were learning basics of programming and HTML5 in the process of learning Game Programming. HTML5 was the first step for them and they created really impressive games.

Alexander Krug
How to successfully distribute and monetize your mobile HTML5 games globally!

How to earn money on games. Good points, recommend to watch video if you are interested in monetization.

Seb Lee-Delisle
Beauty in the browser

"Digital Artist" Seb talks about his projects and CreativeJS page that many of my readers should already know. Then he started a live coding with particles and maked them really impressive and beautiful. You can see similar examples at his github https://github.com/sebleedelisle/JavaScript-PixelPounding-demos. Really impressive and fun presentation :)

**
Szymon Pilkowski
Canvas: we must go deeper!**

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/ardcore/canvas-we-must-go-deeper
Some less known canvas speed optimizations like second canvas for more static content in game. Just watch slides and most of it will be easy to use. Remember that canvas can be used directly in drawImage call of another canvas :)   Next time I think that Szymon will use better formatting for code examples.

Robert Podgorski
How I become rich&fameous making HTML5 games - Game Design in action

Good stories from real life of Game Designer.

Jerome Etienne
Creating a WebGl game in less than 10 minutes with tQuery.js

The best crazy guy at conference ;) If you'r into 3D check it out!

Elle Chen
Reaching millions of gamers in a smart way

Boostermedia will help you earn money on your game. Good talk, we still have to earn money ;)

Will Eastcott
Making A Multiplayer 3D Shooter in the Browser

Good talk about PlayCanvas and how they created D.E.M.O. for Google IO in two weeks http://apps.playcanvas.com/playcanvas/scifi/latest

Day 2

Selim Arsever
Why would anyone use your library?

Told us about http://gamequeryjs.com/, how it works and why it was used and become popular.

Jonas Wagner
Rendering Voxel Worlds using WebGL

One of the best talks, partly because everyone loves voxels ;)

Slides: http://29a.ch/slides/2012/voxels-on-the-web/#/

Everything you should know about voxels, generating terrains, generating textures. Really recommend to watch when video will be available.

Richard Davey
Insert coin to continue

There is really good blog post on photonstorm website with the same title: http://www.photonstorm.com/archives/3045/insert-coin-to-continue-the-html5-game-sponsorship-market Really good insights from guys that really live from creating HTML5 games.

Ryo Takahashi, Brandon McInnis
enchant.js: The 2D/3D HTML5 Game Engine

Talk about Enchant.js, how it evolved since last year, about graphical programming interface for enchant that can be used for creating games. Programmers probably will still prefer JS, but for kids it could be fun. Fun and good presentation. Really impressive how this games are popular.

Henric Suuronen
Making Games For Gamers in HTML5

Slides: http://nonstop-games.com/2012/09/henric-at-ongamestart-2

Nonstop games idea behind life and business really get me. They all moved to Singapore to lower taxes ;) For me it sounds like interesting place to live and work. Talk about how "social" is sending nails and how Travian is social (travian is really big company so don't let simple UI trick you).  They are creating new game right now.

Mario Andres Pagella
Introducing Tracy: A minimalistic, CSS-Powered 3D Rendering Framework

3D without WebGL with only CSS? It's possible! http://www.andrespagella.com/adventures-3d-world-using-css-javascript

Christoph Martens
Cross-Platform Games with HTML5 and native OpenGL

Slides: http://martens.ms/slides/ongamestart/#1

https://github.com/martensms/sandbox/tree/master/ongamestart
WebGL on every platform with custom build and even executable file. http://martens.ms/lycheeJS/ Impressive.

Emeric Florence
The DOM is on fire!

DJ from afterparty ;) Relly good talk about being beek and have fun with DOM :)

Kamil Trebunia
Physics engine anatomy

https://github.com/kamiltrebunia/oGS12

Then Kamil tried to implement physics engine in JS on top of Seb Lee-Delisle particles from first day. His knowledge is impressive, I really need to start Math course at Khan academy after seeing him. Many funny moments. I suggest that you watch it :)

Stas Malolepszy, Zbigniew Braniecki
HTML5, Firefox OS, 2013 - we could fit more buzzwords, but we didn't

Firefox Inception, with Firefox in Firefox OS in Firefox that can run even more nested Firefox OS with Firefox inside ;)  Talk about Boot2Gecko and Firefox OS. Basic ideas behind it, like it all is suggested as new standard with explanation that without standarization Firefox OS development would be much easier and faster. I hope it will work. I really like idea behind these thin OS with browser.

Jordan Mechner
KEYNOTE: From Bedroom to Attic: Making Prince of Persia

Just impressive and very personal talk from the author of Prince of Persia. One thing that really get was how time consuming creating games is. Jordan worked on one game for a couple of years, and some of them in that time get too old... Really impressive. Interesting was to see how not connected things like creating games and script writing can help each other.

Conslusions

Conference was great, I now much more about games.
Venue and food was good, only Wi-Fi was weak...

At the end some reviews that pop out before mine:

http://www.aardman.com/digital/html5-at-ongamestart/
Michał Budzyński: http://michalbe.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/report-from-battlefield.html
Andrzej Mazur (end3r) :http://dev.end3r.com/2012/09/ongamestart-2012-the-aftermath/

I hope that everything in this text is ok, and there are no errors in names or titles of talks.
Let me know if you have link to slides or code from the talks.

Thanks all that I met at onGameStart for great time and I hope we all met next year!

Did you noticed those awesome pixel-art faces? I stole them from http://ongamestart.com/ site. They were created by http://blackmoondev.com/

Feedback or Comments?

← Home

Want to learn more?

Sign up to get a digest of my articles and interesting links via email every month.