Rawkes Weekly: 1st December 2011
The ninth instalment of the all-new Rawkes Weekly. In it I go over recent events and give you some of my favourite links related to Web development and general geekery.
The ninth instalment of the all-new Rawkes Weekly. In it I go over recent events and give you some of my favourite links related to Web development and general geekery.
At the beginning of November I attended New Game Conference, North America's first HTML5 game conference. It was organised by Bocoup and Google and was a resounding success, it even had great WiFi! The only downer to the trip was that I got hit in the head by falling hand luggage on the plane, again…
The videos from New Game are online now. I'd definitely check out Richard Hilleman's keynote, his experience at EA and general thoughts are exactly what the open Web gaming industry needs to hear.
Just after New Game was Mozilla Festival London, where I put on a multiplayer HTML5 gaming workshop.
More recently I've been playing with the brand new and terribly awesome Gamepad API in Firefox. Check out this little demo I made, the possibilities are endless!
Links of the week
- Fieldrunners HTML5 & WebGL
- A recent port of the hit iOS game Fieldrunners to HTML5. Unfortunately it doesn't run in Firefox even though Firefox supports all the functionality that the game requires. Still, it's a great example of what kind of games can be made in HTML5.
- Canvas.fm
- I love data visualisation. This little web service creates a radial visualisation of tracks on Soundcloud. So beautiful.
- Sticky Thing
- Totally pointless but utterly addictive HTML5 demo. Bonus points if you can stick it to the top of the window by only throwing it.
- WebGL Inspector
- Debug WebGL using this tool, fantastically useful!
- HTML5 game resources
- A whole selection of resources related to HTML5 games, curated by Andrew Wooldridge.
- Dynamic procedural terrain in three.js
- A beautiful example of what can be achieved with WebGL.
- Facebook documentation on HTML5 games
- Facebook are spending quite a lot of time and effort around HTML5 at the moment. This set of notes and documentation on HTML5 games is full of useful tips and tricks.
- Are we fun yet?
- This is the page that will be updated with the progress of technologies related to open Web games, particularly within Mozilla.
- Let Your Content Do the Talking: Fullscreen API
- Overview and tutorial of the new Full Screen API that lets you expand any HTML element outside of the browser dimensions to fill the entire screen.
- HTML5 games list from Fleeting Fantasy
- List of HTML5 games being worked on by members of the #bbg (browser-based gaming) channel on irc.freenode.net.
- HyperAndroid's coding experiments
- Awesome selection of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 experiments.
Track of the week
Landed (Strings Version) by Ben Folds. I've always been a fan of Ben Folds but it was only recently that I stumbled across his music again. You should definitely check out the rest of his work.